Pioneers in Science and Technology Series: Robert Frase

PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ROBERT FRASE
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …just start the interview, so will you please lead off.
DR. FRASE: Ok, my name is Robert Frase. I was born on January 1, 1912, in the city of Chicago where my parents ran a retail bakery on the far southwest side of the city. My father was born in Germany and came to this country at the age of 16 preceded by an older brother who got into working in a bakery in Chicago and he then brought over his other brothers who started working in the bakery and the four of them ended up running retail bakeries in Chicago. He never went beyond, in school beyond the age of 16. My mother was a second generation American. Her mother and father had come over, they were Welsh and English. They had come over at the age of 14 in school, was working in the front part of the bakery selling, where my father was a baker in the back part of the bakery. They were married in 1903 and set up their own bakery business.
MR. LARSON: Sounds like the typical start of a family business.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right. I had an older brother, eight years older than I, and in some ways I was an only child because he went off after high school and wasn’t around very much. I went to a very large public high school on the southwest side of Chicago. Its name was Liddell High School. There were 5,000 students; about 2,500 however were taking only a two year course. I got into athletics and I was on the swimming team for a while and the track team, but concentrated on gymnastics. The coach there by the name of Smittle, who had winning gymnastic teams in the city of Chicago. So, between academics and spending every afternoon practicing gymnastics, my time was pretty well taken up. When I was about to graduate, I was the first of my class, my father wanted me to come into the bakery business. He was ready to retire, he said, “If you come in, Bob, and work for two or three years, I’ll turn the business over to you.” That was a pretty tempting proposition because it was clearing about $10,000 a year at the time, which was a lot of money.
MR. LARSON: That was a lot of money at that time.
DR. FRASE: Yes, income taxes were low, but my English teacher was also my coach for my… talk as valedictorian insisted that I had such good grades, that I should consider going to college. So, I decided to do that. I didn’t want to go locally and go home. I didn’t want to go to the University of Illinois because I had been on the campus and it seemed kind of dull to me. My family had a summer place up in the far northwestern Wisconsin and we passed through Madison a number of times, and that campus appealed to me, so I applied there and was admitted. They would take almost anybody with a high school diploma at that time.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. FRASE: That was in 1929, the fall of 1929. I was in something called the experimental college the first two years and then, my father had been quite a traveler as a boy and so had my older brother and so I kind of got the itch and so I took a year off after the first two years. I had a little money because my father though he opposed my going to college said, “If you insist I’ll give you lump sum money to pay your way through college,” which was $4,000. It was a lot of money in those days, but I didn’t get it all because some of it was investments that turned bad, but anyway, I had a little money. So I went to Europe for a year and when I came back I went into majoring in economics, minor in political science. It was during the depths of the Depression and economics seemed to be a field in which you might do something about it. Especially because the Economics Department was constant at that time, was very much involved in state affairs. The professors were working very closely with the state government. So, I got my degree in economics in 1934 and I, in the spring I applied for a teaching fellowship at Tufts in economics, went there and interviewed and got the job. Then a little later it was posted on the bulletin board an announcement for a fellowship, a two year fellowship at Harvard for training for the public service. I applied for that and got that and turned down the Tufts job, which was a good thing. I don’t think I would have been a very good teacher. I was more interested in doing things rather than teaching things. So, I was there for a graduate year, and then I, this involved a year of internship. So I went down and got a job as assistant to John Winant, who was the first chairman of the Social Security Board.
MR. LARSON: That was in Washington?
DR. FRASE: Yes, that was in Washington. That’s right. I worked for him for a while, and then I worked for the Director of Information, worked for the Director of Research. Then I was about set on going back to Harvard because they extended the fellowship for another year. Then Professor Charles McKinley had been monitoring the administration to the Social Security Act from the very beginning. He was a professor at Reed College, who subsequently became president of American Political Science Association. He had done this work for several months, interviewing principal actors as the organization grew and problems developed, had access to the board minutes and so on. The Social Science Research Council wanted to continue the study. It was [inaudible] so they asked me if I would do that. So the next year I continued his study. It was published many, many years later because it was so frank in its discussion of ticklish political problems that the board members did not want it published at that time, though it was essentially finished in 1940. Finally it was published by the University of Chicago Press, I think in the late ’50’s or early ‘60’s. It was called Social Security Capture and Record Study. We went back to Harvard for another year and passed my exams. I had nothing left but my thesis for the doctor’s degree. The Minimum Wage an Hour Act had just been passed and I was very much interested in the minimum wage law. Besides I didn’t have any more money to spend while working on a dissertation. So I took the opportunity and I was the first professional employee of the Minimum Wage an Hour Division in August of 1938. Then I went later to the Department of Agriculture where I worked in the secretary’s office for Milton Eisenhower, then I was in two war agencies and most important was the War Relocation Authority which I was involved in an effort, a very successful effort to get employment for Japanese-Americans who had been put into internment camps. By the end of the war, we had gotten 45,000 out of those [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: How many, you got 45,000 back into the work force essentially.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: About what fraction of them total?
DR. FRASE: There were about 110,000 total, but some of those were young children and many were older aliens, so it was a very large proportion that went into the work force.
MR. LARSON: Fine. That’s very good.
DR. FRASE: Then I was drafted into the Army. I saw this coming, but efforts to get a commission in the Army or Navy didn’t work because of my eyes. So I was drafted and I had worked with some Army Intelligence people and I asked them what the best place was for me. I was then 31 years old with a wife and a child. “For basic training,” he said, “Miami Beach in the Air Force.” So they pulled strings and that’s where I went.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. FRASE: From there I went to the Office of Flying Safety in Winston Salem, North Carolina, working on the analysis of aircraft exits and did some good there I think. From there, out of the blue, I got an offer on a staff of a special branch of Military Intelligence in the Pentagon, which was working not on breaking the Japanese codes, but taking the results of the Japanese code breaking which in many cases was just bits and pieces.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. FRASE: This was in 1944.
MR. LARSON: 1944.
DR. FRASE: So we would put these bits and pieces together along with other information that we had to get a picture of what was going on. Two principal sources in the code breaking were the diplomatic code of the Japanese and the other was the Army supply code. My particular niche was studying the shipping from the East Indies up to Japan with raw materials. We were so good at it, we could get the convoy information in advance and set our submarines right where they were going, and what time they were going and we just picked them off as they came through.
MR. LARSON: That was a very effective use of codes.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then when the war ended, people I had worked with before became a staff member in the Office of Program Planning in the Department of Commerce. This was instead of [inaudible] close to the secretary, there were several of us and we were all special assistants to the secretary. My job was the technical and scientific bureaus of the department, not involved in their technical work, but on their budgets and on their plans for legislation and things of that sort. The National Bureau of Standards was one of those agencies. I worked very closely with Ed Condon when he was director of the National Bureau of Standards.
MR. LARSON: A very famous director.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then I, meanwhile I had gotten a leave of absence and a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to study the International Control of Atomic Energy. That led me into deep trouble because I was interviewing all the principal actors in the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, including the Polish member and when I went to see him his phone was tapped. So then I was involved in the [inaudible] program because they thought I was being subversive. So it took me a year and a half to get cleared on that. By that time, I was so fed up with the federal government that an opportunity came along to open a Washington office for the American Book Publisher Council and be their economist. So I started that in 1950. Then eventually led me into this matter of permanent paper.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well, fine. Well you essentially started in the book publishing business then. What year was that again?
DR. FRASE: This was early 1951.
MR. LARSON: Early in 1951.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. As a result, I was both their economist and statistician, but also their lobbyist, stationed in Washington.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: So I immediately got acquainted with the people in the Washington office with the American Library Association because we had many interests in common and also the Librarian of Congress, the Register of Copyrights and all the chief people at the Library of Congress.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Who were some of the Library of Congress librarians?
DR. FRASE: When I first came in it was Luther Evans, but then in 1954, he accepted the position of Secretary General of Municipal. Verner Clapp was his Chief Assistant. The title at that time was Chief Assistant Librarian. Clapp was a remarkable man who entered the Library of Congress in a very lowly position after graduating from Brown and worked himself up to be Chief Assistant Librarian. Very imaginative, brilliant man. He was the nominee of the American Library Association to become the Librarian of Congress in 1954, but he and Luther Evans had gotten crosswise when they sent a man from Maryland by the name of Butler, who was a close friend of Joe McCarthy. Butler blocked Verner Clapp’s nomination as Librarian of Congress. The man who then was nominated was Quincy Mumford who was then director of the public library in Cleveland and had the backing of the Senator from Ohio. Mumford was a good Librarian of Congress, not imaginative himself, but he had a very good staff and he supported them. Under his management the Library made many important steps forward.
MR. LARSON: Then you were starting in with some of your book publishers. What were some of your first initiatives?
DR. FRASE: Well on the economic side I began to look into what the Census Bureau was doing in reporting on book publishing and book manufacturing in the census and manufacturers and I found that they weren’t doing a very good job. It never had the cooperation of the industry. The industry had ignored that. For example at that time, the census grouped together retail book selling and book clubs. These are two entirely different kinds of operations, economically and every other way. So working with the census we got the census manufacturing improved in that aspect and other aspects. I did also some economic studies on the distribution of books. Well, I got to know the industry very well on the economic side and to some extent on the book manufacturing side. However, I never got into the paper side of the industry.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: I’ve never been in a paper mill surprisingly.
MR. LARSON: What fraction of the book publishing business was actually directly associated with your organization? Did you have a majority of them?
DR. FRASE: Actually there were three trade associations at that time. The Book Publishers Council was what was known in the business as a trade business. That’s general book publishing and then there was an earlier established organization called the Textbook Publishers Institute which was elementary and secondary and college textbooks but also encyclopedias. Then there was a third Association of University Presses. When I opened the Washington office for the United Book Publishers Council I also, many of these parts of the industry were equally interested in some Washington matters like international trade and postal rates, things of that sort. I worked actually for both of them. This was formalized in 1958 when I became director of the George Washington Office of the Textbook and General Publishers and then two years before I left the Textbook Publishers and the General Publishers merged into the Association of American Publishers and I became vice president then in 1970. But the permanent paper story really starts with my acquaintance with Verner Clapp. He was a member of, well after he was not appointed Librarian of Congress in 1954 he became the first president of a new foundation funded by the Ford Foundation called the Council on Library Resources. This was an organization devoted to primarily technical problems of one kind or another for major research libraries. So, Clapp had known about the deteriorating paper problem of course when he was at the Library of Congress and this had been well known, but the causes weren’t very well known…
MRS. LARSON: How much did you say the Library of Congress was spending?
DR. FRASE: At the time I got interested in developing legislation between the Library of Congress and the Council in the Humanities Endowment and other things, there was about $100,000,000 spent to preserve stuff. Not to do anything about keeping these books on paper that would deteriorate. So Clapp was interested himself and learned about some early experiments on the cause of deterioration of paper and then financed through the Council on Library Resources a man by the name of Barrow who had a little laboratory connected with the Virginia State Library in Richmond. Barrow with these funds from the Council on Library Resources did further research and actually developed some alkaline paper. The technical side of it as explored by Barrow and others was that about the time of the Civil War, there was not sufficient rags to continue to meet the demand for paper rags. Also there was an increasing demand for books. So, they turned to using wood fiber, ground up wood and the like, there were two processes really, one just simply ground wood. I think that was the kind of paper mill you worked in, wasn’t it?
MR. LARSON: No, actually there were two paper mills: one was primarily book paper and the other actually was primarily for newspaper and that was all ground.
DR. FRASE: Yeah, that ground wood was for newspaper.
MR. LARSON: The other, the book paper was made by the standard sulfite, sulfate process.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. As I understand it, the problem was not so much with the wood pulp as a fact that they use a sizing, which is a sort of a glaze on top of the paper to fill in the blanks, sort of in the process. This sizing was alum and resin and I don’t know about resin, but alum was acid. Alum, in the sizing, that really resulted in the deteriorating of papers made by that process.
MR. LARSON: So with the demand for paper after the Civil War when it was absolutely necessary to use wood pulp and from that point on…
DR. FRASE: It wasn’t necessary to go to alum, but they did. So, there were several initiatives at that time to try to get publishers to use alkaline paper which had proven to be possible and there was a little bit being produced particularly by a small company called Glatfelter in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. One of the earliest efforts was to develop standards for it, the alkaline paper, named permanent paper. The National Bureau of Standards had been involved in this working with the National Historic Publications Commission, a man by the name of Wilson and the National Historic Publications Commission did develop a de facto standard which they required be met for the papers they required in their publications. Their publications were primarily historical documents, like the complete papers of Thomas Jefferson, which they then contracted out, but they required the paper to meet these standards. That was in 1975. Then the Council on Library Resources again, helped the establishment of a standard which was called the Committee on Public Production Guidelines for Book Longevity. Then I got into it a little later than that because in 1972, I left the American Book Publishers Council and after another government job I became in 1978 the first director of the American National Standards Committee C-39, which was technical standards in libraries and book publishing. I was there from ‘78 to almost ‘83 and while I was there I got started in the Technical Committee on Permanent Paper.
MR. LARSON: Now what were some of the specific standards? Can you give us some examples that were in this…
DR. FRASE: Yeah, the primary thing in the standards was to give up the alkaline, and to use as filler carbonates. So there was a bit of a carbonate reserve of two percent in these papers. That would be sort of a buffer. Also involved in these standards was a test called accelerating aging. So they would heat up papers to try to imitate what they thought would happen with the natural aging of papers over the years.
MR. LARSON: Essentially an accelerated aging.
DR. FRASE: That’s right to imitate the natural aging just by heating the passage of fumes. So we developed specifications that papers had to be made to meet. The first of these standards by the American National Standards Committee was in 1984 and that involved just uncoated book and writing paper. It wasn’t until 1992 that they brought out a revised standard, but the principal revision was to include coated papers, coated papers are used where you want to have a lot of color and illustration. So, as more and more color illustrations got used in college textbooks and technical books and things of that sort it became important to have a standard for coated papers as well as uncoated papers. I would like to rest for a moment.
MR. LARSON: Ok.
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: Now we come to the story of the Congressional Resolution on Permanent Paper. In 1972, I had resigned from my position at the Association of American Publishers because I ran into some personnel difficulties with other people in the organization and I did some other things. As I mentioned, this business of executive director of the American National Standards Committee C-39 which ended in late 1982, I was active with the Library of Congress on some oral history on the history of legislative activities and international activities in the book publishing library field. So as a result of that I went up for the confirmation hearings of, for James Billington when he was nominated as the Librarian of Congress to succeed Boorstin, Daniel Boorstin. Boorstin had succeeded Quincy Mumford. Boorstin was a historian at the University of Chicago. Billington was also a historian, particularly on Russian history who had been, I think, at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the Smithsonian. They knew each other as historians and Boorstin got Billington nominated. Billington didn’t have any real acquaintance with the library field. He was then briefed by the staff of the Library of Congress on the pressing problems of the Library to talk about in his confirmation hearings in the Senate. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island was in the chair and there was a Democrat. He was at that time among other things Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library. He had also had, he knew something about the library. He also knew something about the acid paper problem because he had been on the board of the National Historic Publications Committee. So I went up to the hearings out of curiosity and Billington touched on this problem that the library had of deteriorating paper and the great expense they were going to try to salvage this. He also mentioned that the cause of it was the paper, and Pell said, “Well, can’t we do something about the paper? It looks to me that this problem is going to go on forever, unless we do something about the paper.” Billington allowed this to be the case. I was sitting in the audience and there was a Cosmos Club member up with the staff because the Joint Committee on the Library was sort of a subcommittee of another committee. I think it was Rules and Administration of the Senate. It was Floyd Riddick who later became a parliamentarian in the Senate. I didn’t know him at the Cosmos Club. So he saw me in the audience and came up to me. He said, “I want to introduce you to Mr. Billington. I want to introduce you to Bill Cochran.” Bill Cochran was another staff member who had particular interest in the Library of Congress. Cochran I had known before as a lobbyist on dealing with postal rates. He was big, active alumnus of the University, Duke, University of North Carolina, and he remembered me. [Laughter] So, after that I thought well maybe we could have a Congressional Resolution. So I went up to talk with Cochran later, and he said, “I’ll help you.” But then I found, I went back to my library friends, I was an active member of the American Library Association, and said, “What kind of resolutions do you have on alkaline paper? We can’t get members of Congress interested in this unless a professional association will back them to the hilts.” I found to my surprise that there had never been a resolution on permanent paper. I happened to be a member of a subcommittee on Governmental Affairs for one of the committees of the American Library Association. This was in 1987, the summer of ’87. So I drafted a resolution for the American Library Association and I couldn’t get to the meeting. I think I was in Texas or something, but I got my committee to introduce the resolution which I had drafted and they passed the resolution in early January 1988. Well then I went to work on drafting a resolution for the Congress. I drafted the resolution and I took it to Bill Cochran and I said, “Here is my draft. Can you give me some help on this?” He said, yes, he certainly can. He took it and turned it over to the bill drafting attorneys in the Senate and then they gave me back a document as a draft bill. As far as substance is concerned, it had to be a joint resolution which would be signed by the President, but on the other hand, it had to be something that was not an act, because if it was an act, rather than a sort of sentiment of the congress, you would say how much is it going to cost. Also if you try to impose using alkaline paper for books and documents of enduring value, then you would get resistance at the government agencies and the Government Printing Office. So we had to find some way to get our nose under the tent. This was a device to a resolution which it is the policy of the United States that alkaline permanent paper should be used for books and publication of documents of enduring value.
MRS. LARSON: Could you give us a summary of the amount of extra money involved if say a publishing run of 10,000 books, if 1,000 were on permanent paper?
DR. FRASE: At that time, it was substantial because it wasn’t so much the added cost. As a matter of fact the cost wasn’t any greater, but the demand was so low that there were smaller runs. So it wasn’t stocked by paper wholesalers. It was a special order. Also, the paper manufacturers and the paper merchants treat it as a special order and they would up their ante for it, increase their margin that they had on it.
MRS. LARSON: But the actual manufacturing costs were…
DR. FRASE: The actual manufacturing was no more than if you had the same volume.
MRS. LARSON: How about pollution problems?
DR. FRASE: Well, that came along later and I think, probably, but I’m not sure of this, the Glatfelter and others went into this because of the pollution problems. But that was massively reinforced later under the Clean Water Act and regulations in the Clean Water Act. This meant that paper mills would have a lot of extra costs of cleaning, keeping the water that they put back into the streams if they continued to use the alkaline paper process. So they began to shift over the alkaline process…
MRS. LARSON: Which was less pollutant?
DR. FRASE: Yes. You wouldn’t have those massive costs of trying to solve the pollution problem.
MR. LARSON: So then actually the stricter pollution standards helped the situation.
DR. FRASE: Yes, very much. Very much. That’s right. Once they made transfer actually the process was somewhat cheaper because they could use a lot of carbonates as filler and these were quite cheap. So, where were we? We had the resolution and we got a professional bill drafted. Then I had to find somebody to introduce it. By that time, I’d been 20 years since I had been an active lobbyist and I lost my personal contacts. So one day when I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club with a man by the name of Theodore Waller who had been a colleague of mine in the American Book Publishers Council, I told him what I was up to and he at that time was the executive director of the Senate Democratic Re-election Committee through a friend of his, Alan Cranston who was then Senator from California. So I was asking Ted, “Here I am. I’ve got this bill, who do I get to sponsor it?” He said, “Claiborne Pell’s your man.” I’m on very good terms with his executive assistant. So then and there from the Cosmos Club he called this executive assistant and set up an appointment for me, not with him, but with the legislative assistant for Senator Pell, who had been with him for many years, a man by the name of Orlando Potter. So I made an appointment with Orlando Potter and he began telling me about a study that had recently been made by the Office of Technological Assessment of the Senate on paper which had said that only 10 or 15 percent of the book paper that was being made was alkaline and the report said that there was not much prospect in increasing it. So, Orlando Potter thought this thing out and was going to educate me about the report, but I have a bill here that I want the Senator to pass. So I sent it to him and he said, “This is an internal Senate document how did you get a hold of this thing?” I said, “Well, at the moment, I’m not going to tell you.” I didn’t want to embarrass Bill Cochran, but I went to Bill Cochran later and he said it was perfectly all right. (Laughter) The origin became known. So Potter said, “I think the Senator would be interested in this.” So he sent it over to the Library of Congress and said, “What do you think about this? If the Senator introduces it, will you back it?” And the Library of Congress said, “Well sure we will. The Library Association is going on record and we can get a lot of support for you.” So, Pell introduced the bill in October of 1988. This was just before the end of that two year session of the Congress. Then early in 1989 there was a meeting of the, either the executive committee or the, I think it was the executive council of the American Library Association. I drafted the resolution for them endorsing the Pell bill. Orlando Potter appeared before their legislative committee explaining it and getting their support. Although it was unnecessary, he told them that I drafted the bill, (Laughter) which was very generous of him because it’s rarely ever done. The members of Congress and that staff. (Laughter) So then the bill was reintroduced in February of 1989 as the, no, February 1989, that’s right. This time, Pell had rounded him a staff and rounded up 19 co-sponsors in the Senate, mostly Democrats, but quite a few Republicans. Pell was a very senior Senator. He had been there a long time and had a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. Going back to the resolution and content, the biting part of it was this resolution is the policy of the United States to use acid-free permanent paper in books and documents of enduring value, but there were some other things in there that I had put in, like recommending that they put private publishers they do this too, recommending state and local governments do this too, recommending to international agencies that they promote this idea as well. Also, there was a…
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: …report back to the Congress just what they were doing. They just couldn’t sit on it. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Fine, well with regard to the types of paper that would be covered by this, of course in the last 25 years there have been a great growth in the use of Xerox papers, and also now computer paper and so forth.
DR. FRASE: Right.
MR. LARSON: Now, what is the status of those two kinds of paper and how would they be affected by these resolutions?
DR. FRASE: Actually once you’ve got an alkaline mill, you can produce any kind of paper as long as it’s with ground wood. So if they will turn out xerographic paper, computer paper, all kinds of paper with that same process.
MR. LARSON: But there has been, of course, an increasing amount of documents, perhaps very important ones that would be in the field of Xerox, or computer paper, and so this could be an important factor…
DR. FRASE: In the operation.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. FRASE: If you, there is another type of salvage operation which involves taking the deteriorating paper and getting carbonates into it.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: That’s a very expensive process too. The other way of doing other microfilming is to make a Xerox copy, putting it on alkaline paper. That’s an important part of the salvage process.
MRS. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: But microfilming and Xeroxing, xerographic copying, is labor intensive…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: …and quite expensive, much better you try to preserve the original paper than you don’t have any more labor costs on it. So, getting back to the story, things went along very well in 1989. By the summer of ’89, we got the bill passed by the Senate with 46 co-sponsors, it never went to a committee, just brought up on the floor by agreement, or unanimous consent, and this process involves the Democratic leader and the Republican leader confirming, but they both agreed that their parties would support this, and so it passed by unanimous consent in July of 1989.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that was a very successful project.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right.
MR. LARSON: It’s amazing you got that through.
DR. FRASE: Then we had to go to the House and we didn’t have an obvious sponsor there, like Pell, and our library allies in the associations had, their greatest contacts in the House committees was in the House Committee on Education and Labor, especially the Education Subcommittee. So they picked a principal sponsor there by the name of Pat Williams from Montana. He had introduced a companion bill with the Pell bill in March of 1989. Then we had some bad luck in getting it assigned to a committee. I had anticipated this problem and went to a woman by the name of Adoreen McCormick, who was in the Congressional Liaison, a person for the Library of Congress and had been for several years. I’ve worked with her on other matters and she called up to the Parliamentarian’s office, and of course he was the one who advises the chair and the House as to which committee the bill is to go to. But there was a slip up there, and it got assigned to two committees and that’s always bad news because they have to agree and move first; a big delay, really bad news.
MRS. LARSON: In other words there wasn’t any opposition to the idea; it’s just a question of politics.
DR. FRASE: Yes, it was complete ignorance and lack of interest and somebody pushing it.
MR. LARSON: Yes, yes.
DR. FRASE: So it went to the Committee on House Administration and then to the Committee on Governmental Affairs, and a Subcommittee in Governmental Affairs, headed by Congressman from West Virginia by the name of Wise. And the principal sponsor, Pat Williams, wasn’t on either of these committees, or subcommittees, which was bad news in itself. So eventually we got the House Committee on Administration to give up jurisdiction and pass it over to the Subcommittee on Government Operations. Then began into some other bad news. A staff member for the subcommittee was pushing another bill on paperwork reduction and the American Library Association had opposed his draft of that bill and other ideas. So he wasn’t favorably disposed on anything the American Library Association was pushing. Finally, he agreed to hearings, in I think early 1990, before the subcommittee, but he didn’t even invite the American Library Association to testify in the hearings.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. (Laughter) That shows what importance some staff members can frequently have. But that was such vindictiveness I’ve never [inaudible]. So the Librarian of Congress appeared and the book publishers appeared, and the research libraries appeared, and the archivist appeared, but not the American Library Association. But anyway he then tinkered with the bill and among other things; he limited the number of progress reports that were to be made to three ending in 1995. I’d had it a little more open ended. So then there was a delay because the subcommittee doesn’t meet very often and the full committee doesn’t meet very often, but finally we got through that process and somewhere late, very late in that session, that two year session of the Congress was going to end in October of 1990 because it was election year, Congressional election year. Finally we got passage in the House on September 17. We had a month or so to go and it was a different bill. Then went, we got it quickly through the House though by a similar device. There’s a device, there are two devices in the House to get through uncontroversial bills that have gone through committee. One is called unanimous consent in which they know nobody is going to object and then there is suspension of the rules. Suspension of the rules means that you have to get a two-thirds vote. So the minority, the speaker and the minority leader consulted in the House, and they consulted with the committees and they agreed that there wasn’t going to be any significant opposition so it got put on the suspension of the rules calendar and went through without opposition vote. But then when we got over to the Senate, we missed the opportunity and I’m not quite sure I was certainly responsible, other people too, we didn’t get somebody on the floor at the time that the bill came over past the House to say it’s going to go immediately to the Senate floor, instead got sent to a committee, the Committee on Government Operations and the ALA and other library associations and I were beyond that committee and we just couldn’t get the chairman to do something about it. They had other fish to fry. So as time, last minute, we found there was another device. Even if it gotten deferred to committee, the majority leader and minority leader agreed it could be brought up on the Senate floor and that is the way it was done with its 47 sponsors and nobody opposing, we squeezed it through in the closing days of that Congress. If we hadn’t done that, it would have had to been reintroduced next year as a separate bill and would go through this whole process once more.
MR. LARSON: Fine. That’s a real insight as to how Congress works…
MRS. LARSON: It really is.
MR. LARSON: …and how a bill gets passed or not passed.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
DR. FRASE: And in my 20 years of experience on the hill, I was one of the very few people that knew all parts of this operation.
MR. LARSON: It’s very important.
DR. FRASE: So the bill was then signed, they sent it by President Bush on October 12, 1990, as public law 101-423. The first report then was made pursuant to this requirement that the report be made to the Congress on December 31, 1992. It wasn’t much of a report. It had just been a little over a year and there was an acting archivist and so there wasn’t very much activity on the part of the archivist of the United States.
MRS. LARSON: Was it his responsibility go give the report?
DR. FRASE: Well it was a joint report of the archivist, the Library of Congress, and the public printer. We had a little difficulty. The report was sent over and then it got lost. Finally I found it with the help of Bill Cochran. I got it printed as a Senate committee print. Then there was another report in October 31, on December 31, 1994. And the same thing happened again, it got lost. (Laughter) I rescued it once more and got it out as committee print. Then in 1994, there was a scare with respect to recycling paper, using recycled paper for government use. There was an old recommendation of the EPA that set forth a standard of using 10 percent to start with of recycled paper for government documents and government publications and then this was taken up, being considered and was finally passed as an executive order by President Clinton in 1994. Now there were two kinds of paper that are used in recycling, book paper. One is taking the scraps from the paper mill and taking the scraps from the book printing process, which had never been printed on, and putting it back into the mix. That’s easy, but then there is something called post-consumer waste. That’s stuff that has gone into documents and Xerox paper and is frequently mixed up with a lot of other junk including plastics. So that presents a much bigger problem of putting it back into the paper making process because that junk will foul up the paper making machines.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: So there was nothing said in the executive order about public law 101-423 in the policy of the United States, which took precedence here. (Laughter) So, all of us were very worried about this. With the lobby and the White House to get something into the executive order it mentioned that the agencies would have a choice if they had to use permanent paper for their purposes, they didn’t get bound by this recycled paper operation. So we ran into another dead end with another staff member in the White House who just wouldn’t give us the time of day. We went then by a back door, again, Senator Monahan, the director of the New York Public Library went to Senator Monahan and he wrote to the director of EPA and said, “What about this? Shouldn’t you give priority to permanent paper where it’s required?” So he wrote a letter back to the Senator that said, “There is no conflict whatsoever. We’re in back of permanent paper and if it’s needed the agency should use it.” So that crisis got wiped out. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Shows what complications are foreseen here.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Ok, now move to the implementation, not only in the federal government, but more importantly in the private sector. The government produces documents to some extent, publications, but the big producers of books and journals and so on, are by far the public sector, profit and non-profit. This whole thing was in the air and a lot of initiatives were going on about the time I got into it, which I didn’t know about and they didn’t know about what each other were doing. One of them was a woman author who got interested, a member of the Author’s League and got interested in this, got the authors interested, got the New York Public Library interested. So her name was Barbara Goldsmith, and she put on a big campaign through the New York Public Library to get book publishers in New York, which is sort of the center of book publishing, to take a pledge to use alkaline paper. She was quite successful and some of the permanent paper, prominent publishers took the pledge and the Association of American Publishers endorsed the idea. There was a big ad in the New York Times. This was in the spring of 1989, about the time, a little after I had gotten started on this. The pledge was all very good, but the implementation wasn’t very good because the volume of alkaline paper was not all that great. The publishers did not want, or weren’t willing to make an effort to put the first editions of many books on alkaline paper but they weren’t willing to make the commitment, not the first printings, because they might have to do the first printings in a hurry and they wanted to be able to use whatever paper was available, instead of waiting until they got alkaline paper. So they would not commit themselves to carrying through substantial printings of alkaline paper, which the university publishers were quite willing to do because such printings were not all that common and also university press publishers sold a very high proportion of their books to libraries. About this same time, there was another initiative unknown to me until it was well underway by the director of the National Library of Medicine. The National Library of Medicine runs an operation called…
[Phone rings]
DR. FRASE: Shall we stop for a moment?
MR. LARSON: Yeah.
[Break in video]
MRS. LARSON: Ok, its recording.
MR. LARSON: Alright.
DR. FRASE: The National Library of Medicine runs an operation called the Index Medicus. And this is an index and I guess a summary of what appears in the biological, biomedical literature worldwide and there are some 3,000 technical journals in the Index Medicus. And he got interested in this permanent paper thing and figured out how we could use this Index Medicus as a lever. So he got the endorsement and the trustees to go ahead in support of the Chairman of the Appropriation Subcommittee and started a campaign. When they started, there were very few journals on alkaline paper.
MRS. LARSON: When was this that this started? What year?
DR. FRASE: They started it in 1986 and by 1995, they got a vast majority of the biomedical journals throughout the world on alkaline paper and this was a lead in of course to get activities done in Europe because some of these big international publishers were European publishers and books as well as journals. Then there were two sort of important initiatives. The Association of Research Libraries which is an association of about 105 research libraries in the United States and Canada which have the vast bulk of the important historical research documents and publications, put out a portfolio, which I will show you [holds up portfolio] called, did that show up well enough?
MRS. LARSON: It doesn’t, I can’t read the…
DR. FRASE: Do you see it now?
MR. LARSON: Go in… hold on just a minute. Just keep holding that up there.
MRS. LARSON: There you got it.
MR. LARSON: There we go.
MRS. LARSON: “Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper”.
DR. FRASE: Ok this portfolio was in the collection of documents including the, this came out in the spring of ’89, including the Pell Bill, Pell remarks when he introduced the bill to the Senate, some materials from the state of Connecticut, some technical material, the standards, and so on.
MRS. LARSON: In other words, to make the alkaline paper available, they really had to build new plants…
DR. FRASE: They mostly convert old plants.
MRS. LARSON: Ok.
DR. FRASE: To say “old plant”, they just converted the process.
MRS. LARSON: I see.
DR. FRASE: And in this portfolio there is actually a long account by a paper mill operator who explains it was mostly a process of cleaning out the acid from the whole mill so there wasn’t any contamination left in there and then starting over again.
MRS. LARSON: But the incentives to do it were apparently missing early on.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: And they had to build up from the book publishing.
DR. FRASE: It was the incentive of more demand plus the very important incentive of meeting the anti-pollution requirements.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
MR. LARSON: That was an amazing bonus.
DR. FRASE: Yeah, a really amazing coincidence there.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
MR. LARSON: It could easily have gone the other way…
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: …in which it would have delayed it a lot.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then there was a very persuasive film brought out in 1987 called Slow Fires. This was an educational film about the deterioration of paper and books and documents in libraries. It was brought out by the Committee on Education and Access. This was another foundation operation started sometime before 1987, I don’t know how long, but though its primary purpose was however the salvaging of existing materials. They took account of the problem of getting alkaline paper produced and used, but their major effort didn’t go into it. The film was a very important document, was shown widely in this country including on the hill and in Europe. Then there was another very important player in this game, a remarkable woman by the name of Ellen McCreedy. She started out as a book binder in Michigan, Ann Arbor I think, she had nothing more than a high school education I think. She then began to put out a newsletter on book binding and then got interested in the permanent paper problem and started putting stuff in there as well. She moved her operations to New York City and there she put out this newsletter. This is a one woman operation. She would use a push cart on the streets of New York to move the paper from the paper merchant to the printer. (Laughter) Incredible.
MR. LARSON: Medieval, really dedicated.
DR. FRASE: Really into it. So then she, the first publication was called the Abbey Newsletter and there was some reason in Michigan that that was the reason. Then she moved her operations to Salt Lake City but it was still a one man operation, but she came, became entirely familiar with the whole technical process, just self-taught, but she really was marvelous. She was the one organ in the library field both in this country and abroad that was concentrated in the preservation problem, but the preventive preservation problem. Well she immediately gave publicity to a lot of these developments. Then in a later stage she moved her operations to Austin, Texas, and she put up a parallel, another newsletter specifically on permanent paper. It was called the Alkaline Paper Advocate. This was devoted entirely to that subject, where the Abbey Newsletter which continued, only had the principal developments on alkaline paper. So they were running in tandem. So we got to be very cooperative on many efforts. I think those were the principal sort of parallel papers in this operation, in this gestation period. We all got acquainted, but we started independently. Then there was the matter of state activity, state and local government activity. The State Library of Connecticut got started very early on this, just about as early as I did in 1987. He got a resolution in the legislative of the state of Connecticut, in 1987 endorsing a study and then came back with a report of the study in 1989. The state of Connecticut then passed its first act to start using permanent paper in state and local publications. This was not a sweeping act in the first place, but they acted on it in a year and approved it so in the end it was the most comprehensive of any state legislation. There were other bits and pieces of state legislation around also, here dealt with judicial documents, here was some kind of documents, but nothing very comprehensive, but there was something in a dozen states. Some of them insisted on using rag paper for example, just in the early days there was a special edition of the Library, of the “Congressional Record” on rag paper for preservation purposes. So I got into…
MR. LARSON: At the present time, is the “Congressional Record”…?
DR. FRASE: On permanent paper.
MR. LARSON: …on permanent paper?
DR. FRASE: So I got interested in a state activity too. I was up at a reception at the Library of Congress of the National Commission of Library and Information Science which had been established as an independent commission sometime in the ‘80’s. I got to talking with, this commission was a permanent director and a small staff, but commission members were just part time. I got talking at the reception with the chairman who was a man from New Jersey who was among other things a very active public library trustee. I had gotten used to doing business at cocktail parties as a lobbyist. It was a good way to do business. So I got a hold of this fellow and said, “How about the National Commission getting interested in this? One of your pieces of jurisdiction is to promote library activity in state and local governments.” He said, well, one of his staff members said, “Talk to Mary Alice, and prepare something. Meet with me and we’ll do something about it.” So I developed a letter to the state governments from the chairman of the commission attaching a copy of the federal legislation and asking whether they were doing anything in this field, sent a carbon copy to the state librarian. This first survey went out in 1991 and it got quite a few responses to it. I summarized the responses and it was put into the Congressional Record, my summary by Senator Pell. Then we did another one in 1992, the responses were not nearly as good. By then the chairman of the commission was a Nixon appointee, who was a Republican. The first chair was a Republican too, but not very partisan, but the second chairman was not really interested in the commission and its work and the commission got voted down with some political appointees as commissioners who didn’t really have an interest in the work. This was just sort of an honorary thing for them. So the whole thing sort of broke down and it wasn’t until 1995 and we had a third survey and this was jointly with the Librarian of Congress, sent out to serve a progress report, but we got very little response from the governments. I think by that time there was so much anti-Washington feeling that the governments weren’t going to pay any attention to a letter from a commission whose chairman was the wife of Senator Simon of Illinois. (Laughter) but we got some results out of this survey I can’t really trace how many, but we did get some. That goes on to my own experience in state legislation. Patricia Burger was the librarian of the National Bureau of Standards. When I had my office there as executive director of the American National Standards Committee C-39, I was a guest working at the National Bureau of Standards. By then a member or maybe even chairman of the Advisory Council of the State Library of Virginia and she knew about my efforts and she got an, she lived in Alexandria was active in the Democratic Party at the time. She got an inquiry from a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who in Alexandria who had heard about this problem in some committee she was on and turned to Pat Burger and says, “Can I do anything?” Pat Burger said, “I’ll turn you over to Bob Frase.” So, I met with her and she sort of explained the ground rules of the situation in the state legislature which I had very little contact knowing what little I had was very unhappy. So she said, “Probably the best way to approach this is to, for me to introduce a study resolution to ask the state librarian to report on the problem and make some recommendations.” This was sort of on the Connecticut pattern. So she passed the study resolution on to the state librarian whose a librarian, she turned me over to one of her staff who was sort of a political appointee. We didn’t really get very far in drafting a bill in the state legislature, but it finally got out of her hands and into the hands of the state archivist. The state library, the state archives they are is a subdivision of the state library. So then things picked up and we drafted a decent bill, got introduced in the next session and was passed. There was not much to it. It’s been implemented, but the problem is that primarily it’s building on a previous bill dealing with the judicial documents of state and local governments, and not too many other kinds of documents, publications that followed the law.
MRS. LARSON: So it was still a requirement…
DR. FRASE: For judicial documents.
MRS. LARSON: To be on permanent paper.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: And that was just for the state of Connecticut.
DR. FRASE: No, this was for the state of Virginia.
MRS. LARSON: Virginia. All right.
DR. FRASE: Then my other personal experience, another personal experience that I had was in the, was in Wisconsin. I was a graduate of the university and was active in a kind of sub- alumni association there and still am.
[Phone rings]
DR. FRASE: Pause for a minute. I think I’m going to use your facilities too.
MR. LARSON: All right, fine. Very good.
[Break in video]
MRS. LARSON: Ok.
DR. FRASE: Another thing about Verner Clapp and the Cosmos Club, I mentioned Ted Waller being a member. What was the name, the Parliamentarian of the Library?
MR. LARSON: Riddick.
DR. FRASE: Riddick being president, Verner Clapp was a member, too. He had this office when he was at the Council of Library Resources in the DuPont Circle Building, and we use to have lunch quite often and after lunch we played billiards. So there were a lot of connections with the Cosmos Club.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. FRASE: Ok, back to the state of Wisconsin. I was out there for a meeting and talked with people and they put me in touch with the Democratic leader of the Senate. He was on the board for the Wisconsin Center for the Book. There is a National Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and established by legislation promoted by Daniel Boorstin, which is in the business of promoting books and reading. Subsequently there were various state centers set up. I’m a member of the Board of the Virginia Center for example. Some of them are active and some aren’t, but anyway the Democratic Senate Leader in the legislature of Wisconsin was a member of the Center for the Book in Wisconsin. So I worked with him and never got anywhere with that, but what did happen was Senator Thompson, I mean Governor Thompson, he was governor then, now become much more prominent took this letter from the chairman from the national commission. The staff sent it around to various government agencies which were involved and I tried to follow it, but ground process in several agencies, governmental officials are not apt to want to change the way they are doing things. (Laughter) It’s too much trouble, but finally they got together and checked with the paper companies that were very important in Wisconsin and they finally got around to doing by administrative action of using permanent paper in the state government of Wisconsin. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That work out fine.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Another experience was in Minnesota. Our son Richard was a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. So he knew what I was up to. We were out there one time talking about it. I said, “Any way that you have contacts to get this started in Minnesota?” He said, “Yes, there is a friend of mine, a part-time professor at the law school, who is in the state legislature.” So I hadn’t met the man, but I sent him all this stuff and prepared something. Inevitably, that would get the librarians organized in Minnesota. So he introduced a bill and this covered not only the state government, but local governments as well. They had hearings on it, well not hearings, they just explored it with the organizations involved and the association of county governments opposed it because they didn’t want the state telling them what to do. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: And we still don’t have a bill in Minnesota.
MR. LARSON: Well that often happens with certain governmental organizations. They preserve their turf.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Now the third thing is California and I did not have a role in that but I know something about it and its sort of startling in a way and something unique as far as I know. The state librarian got interested in it, a man by the name of Strong and after the fact, I met him at a reception at the Library of Congress. I said, “How are you doing on your permanent paper bill?” He said, “We passed it and the Governor vetoed it because a friend of his, a financial supporter of his ran a paper mill that produced acid paper.” (Laughter)
MRS. LARSON: End of subject.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: That’s a rather direct connection.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: Was that Governor Wilson?
DR. FRASE: Yes.
MR. LARSON: Pete Wilson.
DR. FRASE: The state librarians and state archivists would either not, my experience and I lobbied them quite a bit because I knew they always had something more important to do, budgets and those things. They never really got behind it. The state of New York for example they had bills in that state legislature for 10 years and never got passed.
MRS. LARSON: Don’t you suppose it’s because they sort of secretly think the CD ROMs are going to take over and the microfilms and that’s the way we, I think it’s all mistaken, you understand.
DR. FRASE: No, I don’t think so.
MRS. LARSON: No?
DR. FRASE: It’s all sophisticated enough to know that the documents are going to be around for a long time. As a matter of fact, permanent paper is the most long lasting of any material that you now have because all of this other stuff has got plastic in it. It has to be redone.
MRS. LARSON: Except for clay.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Except for clay.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Yes.
MR. LARSON: And salt.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
DR. FRASE: Ok. I’ve got a list of the states that did something finally. We can put it in here if you’d like. There are 27. I don’t know if that is relevant or not. The last one I might say a word about. It just came out of the blue just last year, or this year. I got to be known as someone in this field, as someone to talk to. So I would get calls from people in the states that wanted to promote something. So I got a call last fall I think, last year from a preservation librarian in the Library at the University of Utah. He said, “I got your name and we want to do something. Can you help me?” So I made him a big package of stuff and sent it out there and then didn’t hear any more, until out of the blue this year, I think it was this year. He sent me the state law. (Laughter)
MRS. LARSON: Oh how nice! They did it all by themselves.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well that’s sometimes, I’ve had some experience with that. If you just get it in the right package at the right time, to the right person, it just automatically takes place.
MRS. LARSON: Speaking of your package, is it possible to obtain copies of that brochure that you showed in front of the camera?
DR. FRASE: Oh yes. Yes, by all means.
MRS. LARSON: And where is it available?
DR. FRASE: I got an extra copy. I’ll give you the whole thing.
MR. LARSON: That would be fine.
MRS. LARSON: Yes.
MR. LARSON: Get it and put it in my box at the Cosmos Club. I’ll pick it up.
DR. FRASE: Ok, now I’ll go to the international field. I had been an active member in the American Library Association for many years and then back oh, 15 or 20 years ago, I got into going to some conferences, the International Federation of Library Associations [IFLA], not on this subject at all, but on library statistics. I had briefly, while I was an economic consultant headed a project on library statistics for the Art and Library Association. I got involved in UNESCO’s [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] recommendation on library statistics as a consultant to them. So I started going to IFLA meetings. I went to one in Denmark, another one in Czechoslovakia, on library statistics. Then in 1989 there was a bi-annual conference of IFLA in Paris. So I got myself, I just went. Anybody that was a member of the American Library Association could go, but beforehand, I went to a woman by the name of Mary Lee Smith who was in the preservation business on the staff of the Library of Congress and was also at that time had some kind of position on preservation for a committee of IFLA, all in conservation. I went to her and said I would like to get a resolution through the IFLA conference in Paris in August. She said, “You draw up a resolution, I’ll endorse it and we’ll send it to the chairman of the preservation conservation committee of IFLA and see if he will back it at the IFLA meeting.” So I did that and he said he would agree and we introduced it at the committee meeting, I testified on it to the committee and got it passed as a professional resolution. It was the first on that IFLA had ever done on permanent paper, surprisingly.
MR. LARSON: That’s fine.
MRS. LARSON: This is international.
DR. FRASE: While I was in Paris at the time, I thought I could get something going with UNESCO because it would be natural for UNESCO to pick up. Through a friend who had been at one time, not too far earlier had been deputy director general of UNESCO, John Foges, I got an introduction to somebody on the director general’s staff. I had a resolution I had hoped to get passed by the UNESCO general conference in November that year. He received me very cordially, but I didn’t have much time, and I had to go back. I didn’t get to see the people in the secretariat concerned with library matters and they took a very dim view of it. They have to stay...
MRS. LARSON: Why is that?
DR. FRASE: I just surmise this, but it’s a good surmise. First, well, three things. One, “it-was-not invented-here” syndrome. We didn’t invent this thing. Two, the United States and Great Britain were no longer members of UNESCO, so we had no internal clout, and three, UNESCO was very much concerned with the developing countries. They had the majority of the UN and this was a matter that could logically concern them, the developing countries because all of the paper had been just junk, but some of their delegates took the position of if they endorse permanent paper and we don’t make it, then we’re being discriminated against.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
MRS. LARSON: I can see that.
DR. FRASE: So there was a combination of factors. The IFLA resolution as a matter of fact, made a big point of asking UNESCO not to do anything to start with but just to make a survey, an UNESCO survey of how much permanent paper is being used. But even that wasn’t acceptable to them. So that flopped. Then in 1991, there was another general conference of UNESCO that I wanted to go to for a variety of reasons. This was in Moscow. I had been involved in depression matters for many years starting with the fact that I was [inaudible] in Russia when I was knocking about Europe in 1931. In 1947, 1946, had been director of the UNESCO mission in Russia for several months and had been in two book publishers conferences in Russia. So I was wanting to go, I was an old Russian hen, and my wife had never been there, so I wanted to take her along. I went to the IFLA conference and she came along. Right in the middle of it was the coup attempt when they had captured… (Laughter) …the prime minister.
MR. LARSON: That was a very troubled time.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. And there was this assault on the White Tower, the Parliament building. Eleanor was actually in the Kremlin just as a sight-seer the day the tanks were on the street and her bus had trouble getting back to her hotel with the tanks on the street of Moscow.
MR. LARSON: That was an exciting time.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. We were in a hotel not to close to where the conference was in the center of Moscow, but actually nothing much was going on except in the center of Moscow. People in the rest of the city were just going about their business. So I got the resolution through, sponsored by the American delegation, the British delegation, but the last day when the resolutions were passed, got cancelled because of a confusion there and so they never officially got passed at the conference. But then they had a process of sending them out to the membership later and getting them endorsed that way. A couple of years later the resolution got passed and this again stressed UNESCO getting into the act. Then we had negotiations with UNESCO led by Bob Wedgeworth who was the, had gotten, after being executive director of the American Library Association had gotten to be the president of IFLA for two years. But still we got nowhere and to finish that story on IFLA, I was at the general conference, or a conference of UNESCO, I mean IFLA in Cuba, in August two or three summers ago and got involved again with the preservation people, especially the Canadians who were then willing to get in the effort since they couldn’t get cooperation from the staff to get various national delegations of UNESCO to raise the question at the general conference. They were well on their way to doing that, but then UNESCO’s secretariat people persuaded them that they would at long last take the initiative and we didn’t have to do it that way. So that’s where it stands at the moment.
MR. LARSON: Very interesting.
MRS. LARSON: Fascinating.
DR. FRASE: But also in IFLA, at the Moscow conference after the second resolution was passed I talked to the editor of the IFLA Bulletin, I think that’s the name, but I’ve got copies somewhere. They said, “You ought to have an article on permanent paper.” So I did one. The first article they ever had in the 1991. And then I did another one, the “Permanent Paper Progress Report,” and then I did another one in 1995, “Permanent Paper Progress Report, Year 2.” Also on the international side, the Europeans somehow lagged behind on this, and part of the reason except for the Scandinavian countries which had been producers of paper, part of the reason was technical, they used a lot more carbonate in their paper as filler in their book and printing papers, so the deterioration was not quite as great as the one here when we use alum as a sizer and not so much carbonates. There is another factor too, and that is the type of government that you have. You hear a pressure group like the American Library Association can go to the Congress, get a bill introduced and get it started, then the Executive Branch either has to support it or not support it, but anyway, you can get an independent initiative. In Europe you have to persuade the government to do it, persuade the bureaucrats to do it because no bill is going to pass unless it is introduced as a government bill, by the government.
MR. LARSON: Essentially the executive part, branch.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. The executive and the parliament are the same. The executive is a committee of the parliament.
MR. LARSON: Yes. So it’s quite different where they are independent in this country.
DR. FRASE: You can’t use that avenue. You have to persuade the bureaucrats and they are hard to persuade. Having been one myself, I know that much. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point.
DR. FRASE: But to bring it up to date, they gradually got into, York got into the act. But it was slow. In 1995, there was an organization called the European Foundation for Library Cooperation. It was an inter-country library association called the Foundation for Library Cooperation Group de Lesion. They cooperated and got a survey made of European publishers, how much they were doing about permanent paper, using it and so forth, whether they even knew about it. This survey was published in 1995 and it showed they had very little knowledge about permanent paper and only a minority of publishers were using it. Then there was a, meanwhile, there was a catalogue of European publishers published by this same library group with a publishing association on publishers who had paper that met the American National Standard of 1992. At that time, nobody was using the International Standard of 1994 which was based on the American Standard. By that time, there was quite a lot, at least 25 papers that met the American National Standard…
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: …on permanent papers. This followed a catalogue that Ellen McCreedy…
MRS. LARSON: By a catalogue you mean a list of paper mills that produced…
DR. FRASE: Yes. I’ll explain it. The origin of this was that, I think in 1933, when we were still concerned about this problem of conflict between the executive order on recycling requiring a certain amount of recycled material, and the permanent paper law. So we got to talking on the phone and I said, “We ought to find out how much of a problem this is. We have the permanent paper with a considerable amount of recyclable material in it so it wouldn’t present a problem.” So she said, “I’ve been thinking of a survey anyway.” So she undertook to write to all the paper mills in the United States and Canada and asked for information by brand name of every paper that they produced that met the American National Standard of 1992. The result was this first catalogue in 1994. At that time, she got responses so that she was able to say, she wrote to 60 paper companies and she sent them a copy of the standard. She got 28 responses for the 1994 survey. She had 28 companies and they reported that they were producing 387 papers classified by name, classified by company and use. These were all kinds of papers including xerographic papers. She subsequently did this over again in 1995 and increased the number of companies and increased the number of papers.
MRS. LARSON: All alkaline papers?
DR. FRASE: Not only alkaline, but meeting the permanent paper standard. We also used this catalogue to include in the last meeting of the governors so that they could, their people could see this is not a problem. If you want to do it, you can get the papers easily.
MR. LARSON: Very good point.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: It’s not a theoretical.
DR. FRASE: So, that brings us to the present situation. We don’t have any direct measure of how much permanent paper is being use in books and documents. In the original Pell resolution there was encouragement to publishers to tell what type of paper was being used, whether it was permanent or alkaline paper, to put it in the book. This would mean that the librarians could put it into their bibliographical records. So they wouldn’t have to go around testing papers to know whether it was alkaline or not. Also, it would then get into the Cataloguing in Publication system which means that the computerized records of libraries all over the country would have it automatically in their computerized catalogues.
MR. LARSON: How about the Library of Congress?
DR. FRASE: They run the catalogue system which is called Cataloguing in Publication therefore supply the libraries of the United States and abroad too, with the cataloguing information. So if they’ve got this about the paper, it goes very easily into the computerized record of the individual libraries.
MR. LARSON: I make use of, access to the Library of Congress Catalogue through my computer. It’s quite handy. I use it quite often and I’ve never seen any reference to whether the book was permanent or…
DR. FRASE: Well, the only ones that use it that supply that information systematically through the Library of Congress unfortunately are the university presses…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: …and the other presses, publishers got started saying, “Well, we can’t do that because the second and third printings may not be on alkaline paper.” Even though, all, well most of the publishers are printing on alkaline paper now, the Library is not concentrated on having them do that so we don’t have any direct measure. So what we have are indirect measure and this catalogue of permanent paper availability is one measure and another measure is in the third and final report of the three consecutive agencies to the Congress which was as of December 31, 1995, the GPO stated that they, one of their ways of buying paper is by competitive bid and book purchase. The low bidder. In 1995, 99.9 percent of the book papers procured through book purchase by the Government Printing Office were alkaline. So it’s an incredible development.
MR. LARSON: That’s fantastic.
MRS. LARSON: Great.
DR. FRASE: The third report unfortunately got, there were other important developments recorded, got lost again when it got over to the Congress and we are now in the process of finding it once more and getting it printed as a Senate document, but meanwhile, I got onto…
[End of Interview]

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PIONEERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SERIES
ORAL HISTORY OF DR. ROBERT FRASE
Interviewed by Clarence Larson
Filmed by Jane Larson
Unknown
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. LARSON: …just start the interview, so will you please lead off.
DR. FRASE: Ok, my name is Robert Frase. I was born on January 1, 1912, in the city of Chicago where my parents ran a retail bakery on the far southwest side of the city. My father was born in Germany and came to this country at the age of 16 preceded by an older brother who got into working in a bakery in Chicago and he then brought over his other brothers who started working in the bakery and the four of them ended up running retail bakeries in Chicago. He never went beyond, in school beyond the age of 16. My mother was a second generation American. Her mother and father had come over, they were Welsh and English. They had come over at the age of 14 in school, was working in the front part of the bakery selling, where my father was a baker in the back part of the bakery. They were married in 1903 and set up their own bakery business.
MR. LARSON: Sounds like the typical start of a family business.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right. I had an older brother, eight years older than I, and in some ways I was an only child because he went off after high school and wasn’t around very much. I went to a very large public high school on the southwest side of Chicago. Its name was Liddell High School. There were 5,000 students; about 2,500 however were taking only a two year course. I got into athletics and I was on the swimming team for a while and the track team, but concentrated on gymnastics. The coach there by the name of Smittle, who had winning gymnastic teams in the city of Chicago. So, between academics and spending every afternoon practicing gymnastics, my time was pretty well taken up. When I was about to graduate, I was the first of my class, my father wanted me to come into the bakery business. He was ready to retire, he said, “If you come in, Bob, and work for two or three years, I’ll turn the business over to you.” That was a pretty tempting proposition because it was clearing about $10,000 a year at the time, which was a lot of money.
MR. LARSON: That was a lot of money at that time.
DR. FRASE: Yes, income taxes were low, but my English teacher was also my coach for my… talk as valedictorian insisted that I had such good grades, that I should consider going to college. So, I decided to do that. I didn’t want to go locally and go home. I didn’t want to go to the University of Illinois because I had been on the campus and it seemed kind of dull to me. My family had a summer place up in the far northwestern Wisconsin and we passed through Madison a number of times, and that campus appealed to me, so I applied there and was admitted. They would take almost anybody with a high school diploma at that time.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. FRASE: That was in 1929, the fall of 1929. I was in something called the experimental college the first two years and then, my father had been quite a traveler as a boy and so had my older brother and so I kind of got the itch and so I took a year off after the first two years. I had a little money because my father though he opposed my going to college said, “If you insist I’ll give you lump sum money to pay your way through college,” which was $4,000. It was a lot of money in those days, but I didn’t get it all because some of it was investments that turned bad, but anyway, I had a little money. So I went to Europe for a year and when I came back I went into majoring in economics, minor in political science. It was during the depths of the Depression and economics seemed to be a field in which you might do something about it. Especially because the Economics Department was constant at that time, was very much involved in state affairs. The professors were working very closely with the state government. So, I got my degree in economics in 1934 and I, in the spring I applied for a teaching fellowship at Tufts in economics, went there and interviewed and got the job. Then a little later it was posted on the bulletin board an announcement for a fellowship, a two year fellowship at Harvard for training for the public service. I applied for that and got that and turned down the Tufts job, which was a good thing. I don’t think I would have been a very good teacher. I was more interested in doing things rather than teaching things. So, I was there for a graduate year, and then I, this involved a year of internship. So I went down and got a job as assistant to John Winant, who was the first chairman of the Social Security Board.
MR. LARSON: That was in Washington?
DR. FRASE: Yes, that was in Washington. That’s right. I worked for him for a while, and then I worked for the Director of Information, worked for the Director of Research. Then I was about set on going back to Harvard because they extended the fellowship for another year. Then Professor Charles McKinley had been monitoring the administration to the Social Security Act from the very beginning. He was a professor at Reed College, who subsequently became president of American Political Science Association. He had done this work for several months, interviewing principal actors as the organization grew and problems developed, had access to the board minutes and so on. The Social Science Research Council wanted to continue the study. It was [inaudible] so they asked me if I would do that. So the next year I continued his study. It was published many, many years later because it was so frank in its discussion of ticklish political problems that the board members did not want it published at that time, though it was essentially finished in 1940. Finally it was published by the University of Chicago Press, I think in the late ’50’s or early ‘60’s. It was called Social Security Capture and Record Study. We went back to Harvard for another year and passed my exams. I had nothing left but my thesis for the doctor’s degree. The Minimum Wage an Hour Act had just been passed and I was very much interested in the minimum wage law. Besides I didn’t have any more money to spend while working on a dissertation. So I took the opportunity and I was the first professional employee of the Minimum Wage an Hour Division in August of 1938. Then I went later to the Department of Agriculture where I worked in the secretary’s office for Milton Eisenhower, then I was in two war agencies and most important was the War Relocation Authority which I was involved in an effort, a very successful effort to get employment for Japanese-Americans who had been put into internment camps. By the end of the war, we had gotten 45,000 out of those [inaudible].
MR. LARSON: How many, you got 45,000 back into the work force essentially.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: About what fraction of them total?
DR. FRASE: There were about 110,000 total, but some of those were young children and many were older aliens, so it was a very large proportion that went into the work force.
MR. LARSON: Fine. That’s very good.
DR. FRASE: Then I was drafted into the Army. I saw this coming, but efforts to get a commission in the Army or Navy didn’t work because of my eyes. So I was drafted and I had worked with some Army Intelligence people and I asked them what the best place was for me. I was then 31 years old with a wife and a child. “For basic training,” he said, “Miami Beach in the Air Force.” So they pulled strings and that’s where I went.
MR. LARSON: Fine.
DR. FRASE: From there I went to the Office of Flying Safety in Winston Salem, North Carolina, working on the analysis of aircraft exits and did some good there I think. From there, out of the blue, I got an offer on a staff of a special branch of Military Intelligence in the Pentagon, which was working not on breaking the Japanese codes, but taking the results of the Japanese code breaking which in many cases was just bits and pieces.
MR. LARSON: What year was that?
DR. FRASE: This was in 1944.
MR. LARSON: 1944.
DR. FRASE: So we would put these bits and pieces together along with other information that we had to get a picture of what was going on. Two principal sources in the code breaking were the diplomatic code of the Japanese and the other was the Army supply code. My particular niche was studying the shipping from the East Indies up to Japan with raw materials. We were so good at it, we could get the convoy information in advance and set our submarines right where they were going, and what time they were going and we just picked them off as they came through.
MR. LARSON: That was a very effective use of codes.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then when the war ended, people I had worked with before became a staff member in the Office of Program Planning in the Department of Commerce. This was instead of [inaudible] close to the secretary, there were several of us and we were all special assistants to the secretary. My job was the technical and scientific bureaus of the department, not involved in their technical work, but on their budgets and on their plans for legislation and things of that sort. The National Bureau of Standards was one of those agencies. I worked very closely with Ed Condon when he was director of the National Bureau of Standards.
MR. LARSON: A very famous director.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then I, meanwhile I had gotten a leave of absence and a Guggenheim Fellowship and went to study the International Control of Atomic Energy. That led me into deep trouble because I was interviewing all the principal actors in the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission, including the Polish member and when I went to see him his phone was tapped. So then I was involved in the [inaudible] program because they thought I was being subversive. So it took me a year and a half to get cleared on that. By that time, I was so fed up with the federal government that an opportunity came along to open a Washington office for the American Book Publisher Council and be their economist. So I started that in 1950. Then eventually led me into this matter of permanent paper.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well, fine. Well you essentially started in the book publishing business then. What year was that again?
DR. FRASE: This was early 1951.
MR. LARSON: Early in 1951.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. As a result, I was both their economist and statistician, but also their lobbyist, stationed in Washington.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: So I immediately got acquainted with the people in the Washington office with the American Library Association because we had many interests in common and also the Librarian of Congress, the Register of Copyrights and all the chief people at the Library of Congress.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Who were some of the Library of Congress librarians?
DR. FRASE: When I first came in it was Luther Evans, but then in 1954, he accepted the position of Secretary General of Municipal. Verner Clapp was his Chief Assistant. The title at that time was Chief Assistant Librarian. Clapp was a remarkable man who entered the Library of Congress in a very lowly position after graduating from Brown and worked himself up to be Chief Assistant Librarian. Very imaginative, brilliant man. He was the nominee of the American Library Association to become the Librarian of Congress in 1954, but he and Luther Evans had gotten crosswise when they sent a man from Maryland by the name of Butler, who was a close friend of Joe McCarthy. Butler blocked Verner Clapp’s nomination as Librarian of Congress. The man who then was nominated was Quincy Mumford who was then director of the public library in Cleveland and had the backing of the Senator from Ohio. Mumford was a good Librarian of Congress, not imaginative himself, but he had a very good staff and he supported them. Under his management the Library made many important steps forward.
MR. LARSON: Then you were starting in with some of your book publishers. What were some of your first initiatives?
DR. FRASE: Well on the economic side I began to look into what the Census Bureau was doing in reporting on book publishing and book manufacturing in the census and manufacturers and I found that they weren’t doing a very good job. It never had the cooperation of the industry. The industry had ignored that. For example at that time, the census grouped together retail book selling and book clubs. These are two entirely different kinds of operations, economically and every other way. So working with the census we got the census manufacturing improved in that aspect and other aspects. I did also some economic studies on the distribution of books. Well, I got to know the industry very well on the economic side and to some extent on the book manufacturing side. However, I never got into the paper side of the industry.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: I’ve never been in a paper mill surprisingly.
MR. LARSON: What fraction of the book publishing business was actually directly associated with your organization? Did you have a majority of them?
DR. FRASE: Actually there were three trade associations at that time. The Book Publishers Council was what was known in the business as a trade business. That’s general book publishing and then there was an earlier established organization called the Textbook Publishers Institute which was elementary and secondary and college textbooks but also encyclopedias. Then there was a third Association of University Presses. When I opened the Washington office for the United Book Publishers Council I also, many of these parts of the industry were equally interested in some Washington matters like international trade and postal rates, things of that sort. I worked actually for both of them. This was formalized in 1958 when I became director of the George Washington Office of the Textbook and General Publishers and then two years before I left the Textbook Publishers and the General Publishers merged into the Association of American Publishers and I became vice president then in 1970. But the permanent paper story really starts with my acquaintance with Verner Clapp. He was a member of, well after he was not appointed Librarian of Congress in 1954 he became the first president of a new foundation funded by the Ford Foundation called the Council on Library Resources. This was an organization devoted to primarily technical problems of one kind or another for major research libraries. So, Clapp had known about the deteriorating paper problem of course when he was at the Library of Congress and this had been well known, but the causes weren’t very well known…
MRS. LARSON: How much did you say the Library of Congress was spending?
DR. FRASE: At the time I got interested in developing legislation between the Library of Congress and the Council in the Humanities Endowment and other things, there was about $100,000,000 spent to preserve stuff. Not to do anything about keeping these books on paper that would deteriorate. So Clapp was interested himself and learned about some early experiments on the cause of deterioration of paper and then financed through the Council on Library Resources a man by the name of Barrow who had a little laboratory connected with the Virginia State Library in Richmond. Barrow with these funds from the Council on Library Resources did further research and actually developed some alkaline paper. The technical side of it as explored by Barrow and others was that about the time of the Civil War, there was not sufficient rags to continue to meet the demand for paper rags. Also there was an increasing demand for books. So, they turned to using wood fiber, ground up wood and the like, there were two processes really, one just simply ground wood. I think that was the kind of paper mill you worked in, wasn’t it?
MR. LARSON: No, actually there were two paper mills: one was primarily book paper and the other actually was primarily for newspaper and that was all ground.
DR. FRASE: Yeah, that ground wood was for newspaper.
MR. LARSON: The other, the book paper was made by the standard sulfite, sulfate process.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. As I understand it, the problem was not so much with the wood pulp as a fact that they use a sizing, which is a sort of a glaze on top of the paper to fill in the blanks, sort of in the process. This sizing was alum and resin and I don’t know about resin, but alum was acid. Alum, in the sizing, that really resulted in the deteriorating of papers made by that process.
MR. LARSON: So with the demand for paper after the Civil War when it was absolutely necessary to use wood pulp and from that point on…
DR. FRASE: It wasn’t necessary to go to alum, but they did. So, there were several initiatives at that time to try to get publishers to use alkaline paper which had proven to be possible and there was a little bit being produced particularly by a small company called Glatfelter in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania. One of the earliest efforts was to develop standards for it, the alkaline paper, named permanent paper. The National Bureau of Standards had been involved in this working with the National Historic Publications Commission, a man by the name of Wilson and the National Historic Publications Commission did develop a de facto standard which they required be met for the papers they required in their publications. Their publications were primarily historical documents, like the complete papers of Thomas Jefferson, which they then contracted out, but they required the paper to meet these standards. That was in 1975. Then the Council on Library Resources again, helped the establishment of a standard which was called the Committee on Public Production Guidelines for Book Longevity. Then I got into it a little later than that because in 1972, I left the American Book Publishers Council and after another government job I became in 1978 the first director of the American National Standards Committee C-39, which was technical standards in libraries and book publishing. I was there from ‘78 to almost ‘83 and while I was there I got started in the Technical Committee on Permanent Paper.
MR. LARSON: Now what were some of the specific standards? Can you give us some examples that were in this…
DR. FRASE: Yeah, the primary thing in the standards was to give up the alkaline, and to use as filler carbonates. So there was a bit of a carbonate reserve of two percent in these papers. That would be sort of a buffer. Also involved in these standards was a test called accelerating aging. So they would heat up papers to try to imitate what they thought would happen with the natural aging of papers over the years.
MR. LARSON: Essentially an accelerated aging.
DR. FRASE: That’s right to imitate the natural aging just by heating the passage of fumes. So we developed specifications that papers had to be made to meet. The first of these standards by the American National Standards Committee was in 1984 and that involved just uncoated book and writing paper. It wasn’t until 1992 that they brought out a revised standard, but the principal revision was to include coated papers, coated papers are used where you want to have a lot of color and illustration. So, as more and more color illustrations got used in college textbooks and technical books and things of that sort it became important to have a standard for coated papers as well as uncoated papers. I would like to rest for a moment.
MR. LARSON: Ok.
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: Now we come to the story of the Congressional Resolution on Permanent Paper. In 1972, I had resigned from my position at the Association of American Publishers because I ran into some personnel difficulties with other people in the organization and I did some other things. As I mentioned, this business of executive director of the American National Standards Committee C-39 which ended in late 1982, I was active with the Library of Congress on some oral history on the history of legislative activities and international activities in the book publishing library field. So as a result of that I went up for the confirmation hearings of, for James Billington when he was nominated as the Librarian of Congress to succeed Boorstin, Daniel Boorstin. Boorstin had succeeded Quincy Mumford. Boorstin was a historian at the University of Chicago. Billington was also a historian, particularly on Russian history who had been, I think, at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at the Smithsonian. They knew each other as historians and Boorstin got Billington nominated. Billington didn’t have any real acquaintance with the library field. He was then briefed by the staff of the Library of Congress on the pressing problems of the Library to talk about in his confirmation hearings in the Senate. Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island was in the chair and there was a Democrat. He was at that time among other things Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library. He had also had, he knew something about the library. He also knew something about the acid paper problem because he had been on the board of the National Historic Publications Committee. So I went up to the hearings out of curiosity and Billington touched on this problem that the library had of deteriorating paper and the great expense they were going to try to salvage this. He also mentioned that the cause of it was the paper, and Pell said, “Well, can’t we do something about the paper? It looks to me that this problem is going to go on forever, unless we do something about the paper.” Billington allowed this to be the case. I was sitting in the audience and there was a Cosmos Club member up with the staff because the Joint Committee on the Library was sort of a subcommittee of another committee. I think it was Rules and Administration of the Senate. It was Floyd Riddick who later became a parliamentarian in the Senate. I didn’t know him at the Cosmos Club. So he saw me in the audience and came up to me. He said, “I want to introduce you to Mr. Billington. I want to introduce you to Bill Cochran.” Bill Cochran was another staff member who had particular interest in the Library of Congress. Cochran I had known before as a lobbyist on dealing with postal rates. He was big, active alumnus of the University, Duke, University of North Carolina, and he remembered me. [Laughter] So, after that I thought well maybe we could have a Congressional Resolution. So I went up to talk with Cochran later, and he said, “I’ll help you.” But then I found, I went back to my library friends, I was an active member of the American Library Association, and said, “What kind of resolutions do you have on alkaline paper? We can’t get members of Congress interested in this unless a professional association will back them to the hilts.” I found to my surprise that there had never been a resolution on permanent paper. I happened to be a member of a subcommittee on Governmental Affairs for one of the committees of the American Library Association. This was in 1987, the summer of ’87. So I drafted a resolution for the American Library Association and I couldn’t get to the meeting. I think I was in Texas or something, but I got my committee to introduce the resolution which I had drafted and they passed the resolution in early January 1988. Well then I went to work on drafting a resolution for the Congress. I drafted the resolution and I took it to Bill Cochran and I said, “Here is my draft. Can you give me some help on this?” He said, yes, he certainly can. He took it and turned it over to the bill drafting attorneys in the Senate and then they gave me back a document as a draft bill. As far as substance is concerned, it had to be a joint resolution which would be signed by the President, but on the other hand, it had to be something that was not an act, because if it was an act, rather than a sort of sentiment of the congress, you would say how much is it going to cost. Also if you try to impose using alkaline paper for books and documents of enduring value, then you would get resistance at the government agencies and the Government Printing Office. So we had to find some way to get our nose under the tent. This was a device to a resolution which it is the policy of the United States that alkaline permanent paper should be used for books and publication of documents of enduring value.
MRS. LARSON: Could you give us a summary of the amount of extra money involved if say a publishing run of 10,000 books, if 1,000 were on permanent paper?
DR. FRASE: At that time, it was substantial because it wasn’t so much the added cost. As a matter of fact the cost wasn’t any greater, but the demand was so low that there were smaller runs. So it wasn’t stocked by paper wholesalers. It was a special order. Also, the paper manufacturers and the paper merchants treat it as a special order and they would up their ante for it, increase their margin that they had on it.
MRS. LARSON: But the actual manufacturing costs were…
DR. FRASE: The actual manufacturing was no more than if you had the same volume.
MRS. LARSON: How about pollution problems?
DR. FRASE: Well, that came along later and I think, probably, but I’m not sure of this, the Glatfelter and others went into this because of the pollution problems. But that was massively reinforced later under the Clean Water Act and regulations in the Clean Water Act. This meant that paper mills would have a lot of extra costs of cleaning, keeping the water that they put back into the streams if they continued to use the alkaline paper process. So they began to shift over the alkaline process…
MRS. LARSON: Which was less pollutant?
DR. FRASE: Yes. You wouldn’t have those massive costs of trying to solve the pollution problem.
MR. LARSON: So then actually the stricter pollution standards helped the situation.
DR. FRASE: Yes, very much. Very much. That’s right. Once they made transfer actually the process was somewhat cheaper because they could use a lot of carbonates as filler and these were quite cheap. So, where were we? We had the resolution and we got a professional bill drafted. Then I had to find somebody to introduce it. By that time, I’d been 20 years since I had been an active lobbyist and I lost my personal contacts. So one day when I was having lunch at the Cosmos Club with a man by the name of Theodore Waller who had been a colleague of mine in the American Book Publishers Council, I told him what I was up to and he at that time was the executive director of the Senate Democratic Re-election Committee through a friend of his, Alan Cranston who was then Senator from California. So I was asking Ted, “Here I am. I’ve got this bill, who do I get to sponsor it?” He said, “Claiborne Pell’s your man.” I’m on very good terms with his executive assistant. So then and there from the Cosmos Club he called this executive assistant and set up an appointment for me, not with him, but with the legislative assistant for Senator Pell, who had been with him for many years, a man by the name of Orlando Potter. So I made an appointment with Orlando Potter and he began telling me about a study that had recently been made by the Office of Technological Assessment of the Senate on paper which had said that only 10 or 15 percent of the book paper that was being made was alkaline and the report said that there was not much prospect in increasing it. So, Orlando Potter thought this thing out and was going to educate me about the report, but I have a bill here that I want the Senator to pass. So I sent it to him and he said, “This is an internal Senate document how did you get a hold of this thing?” I said, “Well, at the moment, I’m not going to tell you.” I didn’t want to embarrass Bill Cochran, but I went to Bill Cochran later and he said it was perfectly all right. (Laughter) The origin became known. So Potter said, “I think the Senator would be interested in this.” So he sent it over to the Library of Congress and said, “What do you think about this? If the Senator introduces it, will you back it?” And the Library of Congress said, “Well sure we will. The Library Association is going on record and we can get a lot of support for you.” So, Pell introduced the bill in October of 1988. This was just before the end of that two year session of the Congress. Then early in 1989 there was a meeting of the, either the executive committee or the, I think it was the executive council of the American Library Association. I drafted the resolution for them endorsing the Pell bill. Orlando Potter appeared before their legislative committee explaining it and getting their support. Although it was unnecessary, he told them that I drafted the bill, (Laughter) which was very generous of him because it’s rarely ever done. The members of Congress and that staff. (Laughter) So then the bill was reintroduced in February of 1989 as the, no, February 1989, that’s right. This time, Pell had rounded him a staff and rounded up 19 co-sponsors in the Senate, mostly Democrats, but quite a few Republicans. Pell was a very senior Senator. He had been there a long time and had a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. Going back to the resolution and content, the biting part of it was this resolution is the policy of the United States to use acid-free permanent paper in books and documents of enduring value, but there were some other things in there that I had put in, like recommending that they put private publishers they do this too, recommending state and local governments do this too, recommending to international agencies that they promote this idea as well. Also, there was a…
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: …report back to the Congress just what they were doing. They just couldn’t sit on it. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Fine, well with regard to the types of paper that would be covered by this, of course in the last 25 years there have been a great growth in the use of Xerox papers, and also now computer paper and so forth.
DR. FRASE: Right.
MR. LARSON: Now, what is the status of those two kinds of paper and how would they be affected by these resolutions?
DR. FRASE: Actually once you’ve got an alkaline mill, you can produce any kind of paper as long as it’s with ground wood. So if they will turn out xerographic paper, computer paper, all kinds of paper with that same process.
MR. LARSON: But there has been, of course, an increasing amount of documents, perhaps very important ones that would be in the field of Xerox, or computer paper, and so this could be an important factor…
DR. FRASE: In the operation.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. FRASE: If you, there is another type of salvage operation which involves taking the deteriorating paper and getting carbonates into it.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: That’s a very expensive process too. The other way of doing other microfilming is to make a Xerox copy, putting it on alkaline paper. That’s an important part of the salvage process.
MRS. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: But microfilming and Xeroxing, xerographic copying, is labor intensive…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: …and quite expensive, much better you try to preserve the original paper than you don’t have any more labor costs on it. So, getting back to the story, things went along very well in 1989. By the summer of ’89, we got the bill passed by the Senate with 46 co-sponsors, it never went to a committee, just brought up on the floor by agreement, or unanimous consent, and this process involves the Democratic leader and the Republican leader confirming, but they both agreed that their parties would support this, and so it passed by unanimous consent in July of 1989.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes. Well that was a very successful project.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right.
MR. LARSON: It’s amazing you got that through.
DR. FRASE: Then we had to go to the House and we didn’t have an obvious sponsor there, like Pell, and our library allies in the associations had, their greatest contacts in the House committees was in the House Committee on Education and Labor, especially the Education Subcommittee. So they picked a principal sponsor there by the name of Pat Williams from Montana. He had introduced a companion bill with the Pell bill in March of 1989. Then we had some bad luck in getting it assigned to a committee. I had anticipated this problem and went to a woman by the name of Adoreen McCormick, who was in the Congressional Liaison, a person for the Library of Congress and had been for several years. I’ve worked with her on other matters and she called up to the Parliamentarian’s office, and of course he was the one who advises the chair and the House as to which committee the bill is to go to. But there was a slip up there, and it got assigned to two committees and that’s always bad news because they have to agree and move first; a big delay, really bad news.
MRS. LARSON: In other words there wasn’t any opposition to the idea; it’s just a question of politics.
DR. FRASE: Yes, it was complete ignorance and lack of interest and somebody pushing it.
MR. LARSON: Yes, yes.
DR. FRASE: So it went to the Committee on House Administration and then to the Committee on Governmental Affairs, and a Subcommittee in Governmental Affairs, headed by Congressman from West Virginia by the name of Wise. And the principal sponsor, Pat Williams, wasn’t on either of these committees, or subcommittees, which was bad news in itself. So eventually we got the House Committee on Administration to give up jurisdiction and pass it over to the Subcommittee on Government Operations. Then began into some other bad news. A staff member for the subcommittee was pushing another bill on paperwork reduction and the American Library Association had opposed his draft of that bill and other ideas. So he wasn’t favorably disposed on anything the American Library Association was pushing. Finally, he agreed to hearings, in I think early 1990, before the subcommittee, but he didn’t even invite the American Library Association to testify in the hearings.
MR. LARSON: That’s amazing.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. (Laughter) That shows what importance some staff members can frequently have. But that was such vindictiveness I’ve never [inaudible]. So the Librarian of Congress appeared and the book publishers appeared, and the research libraries appeared, and the archivist appeared, but not the American Library Association. But anyway he then tinkered with the bill and among other things; he limited the number of progress reports that were to be made to three ending in 1995. I’d had it a little more open ended. So then there was a delay because the subcommittee doesn’t meet very often and the full committee doesn’t meet very often, but finally we got through that process and somewhere late, very late in that session, that two year session of the Congress was going to end in October of 1990 because it was election year, Congressional election year. Finally we got passage in the House on September 17. We had a month or so to go and it was a different bill. Then went, we got it quickly through the House though by a similar device. There’s a device, there are two devices in the House to get through uncontroversial bills that have gone through committee. One is called unanimous consent in which they know nobody is going to object and then there is suspension of the rules. Suspension of the rules means that you have to get a two-thirds vote. So the minority, the speaker and the minority leader consulted in the House, and they consulted with the committees and they agreed that there wasn’t going to be any significant opposition so it got put on the suspension of the rules calendar and went through without opposition vote. But then when we got over to the Senate, we missed the opportunity and I’m not quite sure I was certainly responsible, other people too, we didn’t get somebody on the floor at the time that the bill came over past the House to say it’s going to go immediately to the Senate floor, instead got sent to a committee, the Committee on Government Operations and the ALA and other library associations and I were beyond that committee and we just couldn’t get the chairman to do something about it. They had other fish to fry. So as time, last minute, we found there was another device. Even if it gotten deferred to committee, the majority leader and minority leader agreed it could be brought up on the Senate floor and that is the way it was done with its 47 sponsors and nobody opposing, we squeezed it through in the closing days of that Congress. If we hadn’t done that, it would have had to been reintroduced next year as a separate bill and would go through this whole process once more.
MR. LARSON: Fine. That’s a real insight as to how Congress works…
MRS. LARSON: It really is.
MR. LARSON: …and how a bill gets passed or not passed.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
DR. FRASE: And in my 20 years of experience on the hill, I was one of the very few people that knew all parts of this operation.
MR. LARSON: It’s very important.
DR. FRASE: So the bill was then signed, they sent it by President Bush on October 12, 1990, as public law 101-423. The first report then was made pursuant to this requirement that the report be made to the Congress on December 31, 1992. It wasn’t much of a report. It had just been a little over a year and there was an acting archivist and so there wasn’t very much activity on the part of the archivist of the United States.
MRS. LARSON: Was it his responsibility go give the report?
DR. FRASE: Well it was a joint report of the archivist, the Library of Congress, and the public printer. We had a little difficulty. The report was sent over and then it got lost. Finally I found it with the help of Bill Cochran. I got it printed as a Senate committee print. Then there was another report in October 31, on December 31, 1994. And the same thing happened again, it got lost. (Laughter) I rescued it once more and got it out as committee print. Then in 1994, there was a scare with respect to recycling paper, using recycled paper for government use. There was an old recommendation of the EPA that set forth a standard of using 10 percent to start with of recycled paper for government documents and government publications and then this was taken up, being considered and was finally passed as an executive order by President Clinton in 1994. Now there were two kinds of paper that are used in recycling, book paper. One is taking the scraps from the paper mill and taking the scraps from the book printing process, which had never been printed on, and putting it back into the mix. That’s easy, but then there is something called post-consumer waste. That’s stuff that has gone into documents and Xerox paper and is frequently mixed up with a lot of other junk including plastics. So that presents a much bigger problem of putting it back into the paper making process because that junk will foul up the paper making machines.
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: So there was nothing said in the executive order about public law 101-423 in the policy of the United States, which took precedence here. (Laughter) So, all of us were very worried about this. With the lobby and the White House to get something into the executive order it mentioned that the agencies would have a choice if they had to use permanent paper for their purposes, they didn’t get bound by this recycled paper operation. So we ran into another dead end with another staff member in the White House who just wouldn’t give us the time of day. We went then by a back door, again, Senator Monahan, the director of the New York Public Library went to Senator Monahan and he wrote to the director of EPA and said, “What about this? Shouldn’t you give priority to permanent paper where it’s required?” So he wrote a letter back to the Senator that said, “There is no conflict whatsoever. We’re in back of permanent paper and if it’s needed the agency should use it.” So that crisis got wiped out. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Shows what complications are foreseen here.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Ok, now move to the implementation, not only in the federal government, but more importantly in the private sector. The government produces documents to some extent, publications, but the big producers of books and journals and so on, are by far the public sector, profit and non-profit. This whole thing was in the air and a lot of initiatives were going on about the time I got into it, which I didn’t know about and they didn’t know about what each other were doing. One of them was a woman author who got interested, a member of the Author’s League and got interested in this, got the authors interested, got the New York Public Library interested. So her name was Barbara Goldsmith, and she put on a big campaign through the New York Public Library to get book publishers in New York, which is sort of the center of book publishing, to take a pledge to use alkaline paper. She was quite successful and some of the permanent paper, prominent publishers took the pledge and the Association of American Publishers endorsed the idea. There was a big ad in the New York Times. This was in the spring of 1989, about the time, a little after I had gotten started on this. The pledge was all very good, but the implementation wasn’t very good because the volume of alkaline paper was not all that great. The publishers did not want, or weren’t willing to make an effort to put the first editions of many books on alkaline paper but they weren’t willing to make the commitment, not the first printings, because they might have to do the first printings in a hurry and they wanted to be able to use whatever paper was available, instead of waiting until they got alkaline paper. So they would not commit themselves to carrying through substantial printings of alkaline paper, which the university publishers were quite willing to do because such printings were not all that common and also university press publishers sold a very high proportion of their books to libraries. About this same time, there was another initiative unknown to me until it was well underway by the director of the National Library of Medicine. The National Library of Medicine runs an operation called…
[Phone rings]
DR. FRASE: Shall we stop for a moment?
MR. LARSON: Yeah.
[Break in video]
MRS. LARSON: Ok, its recording.
MR. LARSON: Alright.
DR. FRASE: The National Library of Medicine runs an operation called the Index Medicus. And this is an index and I guess a summary of what appears in the biological, biomedical literature worldwide and there are some 3,000 technical journals in the Index Medicus. And he got interested in this permanent paper thing and figured out how we could use this Index Medicus as a lever. So he got the endorsement and the trustees to go ahead in support of the Chairman of the Appropriation Subcommittee and started a campaign. When they started, there were very few journals on alkaline paper.
MRS. LARSON: When was this that this started? What year?
DR. FRASE: They started it in 1986 and by 1995, they got a vast majority of the biomedical journals throughout the world on alkaline paper and this was a lead in of course to get activities done in Europe because some of these big international publishers were European publishers and books as well as journals. Then there were two sort of important initiatives. The Association of Research Libraries which is an association of about 105 research libraries in the United States and Canada which have the vast bulk of the important historical research documents and publications, put out a portfolio, which I will show you [holds up portfolio] called, did that show up well enough?
MRS. LARSON: It doesn’t, I can’t read the…
DR. FRASE: Do you see it now?
MR. LARSON: Go in… hold on just a minute. Just keep holding that up there.
MRS. LARSON: There you got it.
MR. LARSON: There we go.
MRS. LARSON: “Preserving Knowledge: The Case for Alkaline Paper”.
DR. FRASE: Ok this portfolio was in the collection of documents including the, this came out in the spring of ’89, including the Pell Bill, Pell remarks when he introduced the bill to the Senate, some materials from the state of Connecticut, some technical material, the standards, and so on.
MRS. LARSON: In other words, to make the alkaline paper available, they really had to build new plants…
DR. FRASE: They mostly convert old plants.
MRS. LARSON: Ok.
DR. FRASE: To say “old plant”, they just converted the process.
MRS. LARSON: I see.
DR. FRASE: And in this portfolio there is actually a long account by a paper mill operator who explains it was mostly a process of cleaning out the acid from the whole mill so there wasn’t any contamination left in there and then starting over again.
MRS. LARSON: But the incentives to do it were apparently missing early on.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: And they had to build up from the book publishing.
DR. FRASE: It was the incentive of more demand plus the very important incentive of meeting the anti-pollution requirements.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
MR. LARSON: That was an amazing bonus.
DR. FRASE: Yeah, a really amazing coincidence there.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
MR. LARSON: It could easily have gone the other way…
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: …in which it would have delayed it a lot.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Then there was a very persuasive film brought out in 1987 called Slow Fires. This was an educational film about the deterioration of paper and books and documents in libraries. It was brought out by the Committee on Education and Access. This was another foundation operation started sometime before 1987, I don’t know how long, but though its primary purpose was however the salvaging of existing materials. They took account of the problem of getting alkaline paper produced and used, but their major effort didn’t go into it. The film was a very important document, was shown widely in this country including on the hill and in Europe. Then there was another very important player in this game, a remarkable woman by the name of Ellen McCreedy. She started out as a book binder in Michigan, Ann Arbor I think, she had nothing more than a high school education I think. She then began to put out a newsletter on book binding and then got interested in the permanent paper problem and started putting stuff in there as well. She moved her operations to New York City and there she put out this newsletter. This is a one woman operation. She would use a push cart on the streets of New York to move the paper from the paper merchant to the printer. (Laughter) Incredible.
MR. LARSON: Medieval, really dedicated.
DR. FRASE: Really into it. So then she, the first publication was called the Abbey Newsletter and there was some reason in Michigan that that was the reason. Then she moved her operations to Salt Lake City but it was still a one man operation, but she came, became entirely familiar with the whole technical process, just self-taught, but she really was marvelous. She was the one organ in the library field both in this country and abroad that was concentrated in the preservation problem, but the preventive preservation problem. Well she immediately gave publicity to a lot of these developments. Then in a later stage she moved her operations to Austin, Texas, and she put up a parallel, another newsletter specifically on permanent paper. It was called the Alkaline Paper Advocate. This was devoted entirely to that subject, where the Abbey Newsletter which continued, only had the principal developments on alkaline paper. So they were running in tandem. So we got to be very cooperative on many efforts. I think those were the principal sort of parallel papers in this operation, in this gestation period. We all got acquainted, but we started independently. Then there was the matter of state activity, state and local government activity. The State Library of Connecticut got started very early on this, just about as early as I did in 1987. He got a resolution in the legislative of the state of Connecticut, in 1987 endorsing a study and then came back with a report of the study in 1989. The state of Connecticut then passed its first act to start using permanent paper in state and local publications. This was not a sweeping act in the first place, but they acted on it in a year and approved it so in the end it was the most comprehensive of any state legislation. There were other bits and pieces of state legislation around also, here dealt with judicial documents, here was some kind of documents, but nothing very comprehensive, but there was something in a dozen states. Some of them insisted on using rag paper for example, just in the early days there was a special edition of the Library, of the “Congressional Record” on rag paper for preservation purposes. So I got into…
MR. LARSON: At the present time, is the “Congressional Record”…?
DR. FRASE: On permanent paper.
MR. LARSON: …on permanent paper?
DR. FRASE: So I got interested in a state activity too. I was up at a reception at the Library of Congress of the National Commission of Library and Information Science which had been established as an independent commission sometime in the ‘80’s. I got to talking with, this commission was a permanent director and a small staff, but commission members were just part time. I got talking at the reception with the chairman who was a man from New Jersey who was among other things a very active public library trustee. I had gotten used to doing business at cocktail parties as a lobbyist. It was a good way to do business. So I got a hold of this fellow and said, “How about the National Commission getting interested in this? One of your pieces of jurisdiction is to promote library activity in state and local governments.” He said, well, one of his staff members said, “Talk to Mary Alice, and prepare something. Meet with me and we’ll do something about it.” So I developed a letter to the state governments from the chairman of the commission attaching a copy of the federal legislation and asking whether they were doing anything in this field, sent a carbon copy to the state librarian. This first survey went out in 1991 and it got quite a few responses to it. I summarized the responses and it was put into the Congressional Record, my summary by Senator Pell. Then we did another one in 1992, the responses were not nearly as good. By then the chairman of the commission was a Nixon appointee, who was a Republican. The first chair was a Republican too, but not very partisan, but the second chairman was not really interested in the commission and its work and the commission got voted down with some political appointees as commissioners who didn’t really have an interest in the work. This was just sort of an honorary thing for them. So the whole thing sort of broke down and it wasn’t until 1995 and we had a third survey and this was jointly with the Librarian of Congress, sent out to serve a progress report, but we got very little response from the governments. I think by that time there was so much anti-Washington feeling that the governments weren’t going to pay any attention to a letter from a commission whose chairman was the wife of Senator Simon of Illinois. (Laughter) but we got some results out of this survey I can’t really trace how many, but we did get some. That goes on to my own experience in state legislation. Patricia Burger was the librarian of the National Bureau of Standards. When I had my office there as executive director of the American National Standards Committee C-39, I was a guest working at the National Bureau of Standards. By then a member or maybe even chairman of the Advisory Council of the State Library of Virginia and she knew about my efforts and she got an, she lived in Alexandria was active in the Democratic Party at the time. She got an inquiry from a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who in Alexandria who had heard about this problem in some committee she was on and turned to Pat Burger and says, “Can I do anything?” Pat Burger said, “I’ll turn you over to Bob Frase.” So, I met with her and she sort of explained the ground rules of the situation in the state legislature which I had very little contact knowing what little I had was very unhappy. So she said, “Probably the best way to approach this is to, for me to introduce a study resolution to ask the state librarian to report on the problem and make some recommendations.” This was sort of on the Connecticut pattern. So she passed the study resolution on to the state librarian whose a librarian, she turned me over to one of her staff who was sort of a political appointee. We didn’t really get very far in drafting a bill in the state legislature, but it finally got out of her hands and into the hands of the state archivist. The state library, the state archives they are is a subdivision of the state library. So then things picked up and we drafted a decent bill, got introduced in the next session and was passed. There was not much to it. It’s been implemented, but the problem is that primarily it’s building on a previous bill dealing with the judicial documents of state and local governments, and not too many other kinds of documents, publications that followed the law.
MRS. LARSON: So it was still a requirement…
DR. FRASE: For judicial documents.
MRS. LARSON: To be on permanent paper.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: And that was just for the state of Connecticut.
DR. FRASE: No, this was for the state of Virginia.
MRS. LARSON: Virginia. All right.
DR. FRASE: Then my other personal experience, another personal experience that I had was in the, was in Wisconsin. I was a graduate of the university and was active in a kind of sub- alumni association there and still am.
[Phone rings]
DR. FRASE: Pause for a minute. I think I’m going to use your facilities too.
MR. LARSON: All right, fine. Very good.
[Break in video]
MRS. LARSON: Ok.
DR. FRASE: Another thing about Verner Clapp and the Cosmos Club, I mentioned Ted Waller being a member. What was the name, the Parliamentarian of the Library?
MR. LARSON: Riddick.
DR. FRASE: Riddick being president, Verner Clapp was a member, too. He had this office when he was at the Council of Library Resources in the DuPont Circle Building, and we use to have lunch quite often and after lunch we played billiards. So there were a lot of connections with the Cosmos Club.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
DR. FRASE: Ok, back to the state of Wisconsin. I was out there for a meeting and talked with people and they put me in touch with the Democratic leader of the Senate. He was on the board for the Wisconsin Center for the Book. There is a National Center for the Book at the Library of Congress and established by legislation promoted by Daniel Boorstin, which is in the business of promoting books and reading. Subsequently there were various state centers set up. I’m a member of the Board of the Virginia Center for example. Some of them are active and some aren’t, but anyway the Democratic Senate Leader in the legislature of Wisconsin was a member of the Center for the Book in Wisconsin. So I worked with him and never got anywhere with that, but what did happen was Senator Thompson, I mean Governor Thompson, he was governor then, now become much more prominent took this letter from the chairman from the national commission. The staff sent it around to various government agencies which were involved and I tried to follow it, but ground process in several agencies, governmental officials are not apt to want to change the way they are doing things. (Laughter) It’s too much trouble, but finally they got together and checked with the paper companies that were very important in Wisconsin and they finally got around to doing by administrative action of using permanent paper in the state government of Wisconsin. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That work out fine.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Another experience was in Minnesota. Our son Richard was a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. So he knew what I was up to. We were out there one time talking about it. I said, “Any way that you have contacts to get this started in Minnesota?” He said, “Yes, there is a friend of mine, a part-time professor at the law school, who is in the state legislature.” So I hadn’t met the man, but I sent him all this stuff and prepared something. Inevitably, that would get the librarians organized in Minnesota. So he introduced a bill and this covered not only the state government, but local governments as well. They had hearings on it, well not hearings, they just explored it with the organizations involved and the association of county governments opposed it because they didn’t want the state telling them what to do. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: And we still don’t have a bill in Minnesota.
MR. LARSON: Well that often happens with certain governmental organizations. They preserve their turf.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Now the third thing is California and I did not have a role in that but I know something about it and its sort of startling in a way and something unique as far as I know. The state librarian got interested in it, a man by the name of Strong and after the fact, I met him at a reception at the Library of Congress. I said, “How are you doing on your permanent paper bill?” He said, “We passed it and the Governor vetoed it because a friend of his, a financial supporter of his ran a paper mill that produced acid paper.” (Laughter)
MRS. LARSON: End of subject.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: That’s a rather direct connection.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MRS. LARSON: Was that Governor Wilson?
DR. FRASE: Yes.
MR. LARSON: Pete Wilson.
DR. FRASE: The state librarians and state archivists would either not, my experience and I lobbied them quite a bit because I knew they always had something more important to do, budgets and those things. They never really got behind it. The state of New York for example they had bills in that state legislature for 10 years and never got passed.
MRS. LARSON: Don’t you suppose it’s because they sort of secretly think the CD ROMs are going to take over and the microfilms and that’s the way we, I think it’s all mistaken, you understand.
DR. FRASE: No, I don’t think so.
MRS. LARSON: No?
DR. FRASE: It’s all sophisticated enough to know that the documents are going to be around for a long time. As a matter of fact, permanent paper is the most long lasting of any material that you now have because all of this other stuff has got plastic in it. It has to be redone.
MRS. LARSON: Except for clay.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: Except for clay.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. Yes.
MR. LARSON: And salt.
MRS. LARSON: Yeah.
DR. FRASE: Ok. I’ve got a list of the states that did something finally. We can put it in here if you’d like. There are 27. I don’t know if that is relevant or not. The last one I might say a word about. It just came out of the blue just last year, or this year. I got to be known as someone in this field, as someone to talk to. So I would get calls from people in the states that wanted to promote something. So I got a call last fall I think, last year from a preservation librarian in the Library at the University of Utah. He said, “I got your name and we want to do something. Can you help me?” So I made him a big package of stuff and sent it out there and then didn’t hear any more, until out of the blue this year, I think it was this year. He sent me the state law. (Laughter)
MRS. LARSON: Oh how nice! They did it all by themselves.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: Well that’s sometimes, I’ve had some experience with that. If you just get it in the right package at the right time, to the right person, it just automatically takes place.
MRS. LARSON: Speaking of your package, is it possible to obtain copies of that brochure that you showed in front of the camera?
DR. FRASE: Oh yes. Yes, by all means.
MRS. LARSON: And where is it available?
DR. FRASE: I got an extra copy. I’ll give you the whole thing.
MR. LARSON: That would be fine.
MRS. LARSON: Yes.
MR. LARSON: Get it and put it in my box at the Cosmos Club. I’ll pick it up.
DR. FRASE: Ok, now I’ll go to the international field. I had been an active member in the American Library Association for many years and then back oh, 15 or 20 years ago, I got into going to some conferences, the International Federation of Library Associations [IFLA], not on this subject at all, but on library statistics. I had briefly, while I was an economic consultant headed a project on library statistics for the Art and Library Association. I got involved in UNESCO’s [United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] recommendation on library statistics as a consultant to them. So I started going to IFLA meetings. I went to one in Denmark, another one in Czechoslovakia, on library statistics. Then in 1989 there was a bi-annual conference of IFLA in Paris. So I got myself, I just went. Anybody that was a member of the American Library Association could go, but beforehand, I went to a woman by the name of Mary Lee Smith who was in the preservation business on the staff of the Library of Congress and was also at that time had some kind of position on preservation for a committee of IFLA, all in conservation. I went to her and said I would like to get a resolution through the IFLA conference in Paris in August. She said, “You draw up a resolution, I’ll endorse it and we’ll send it to the chairman of the preservation conservation committee of IFLA and see if he will back it at the IFLA meeting.” So I did that and he said he would agree and we introduced it at the committee meeting, I testified on it to the committee and got it passed as a professional resolution. It was the first on that IFLA had ever done on permanent paper, surprisingly.
MR. LARSON: That’s fine.
MRS. LARSON: This is international.
DR. FRASE: While I was in Paris at the time, I thought I could get something going with UNESCO because it would be natural for UNESCO to pick up. Through a friend who had been at one time, not too far earlier had been deputy director general of UNESCO, John Foges, I got an introduction to somebody on the director general’s staff. I had a resolution I had hoped to get passed by the UNESCO general conference in November that year. He received me very cordially, but I didn’t have much time, and I had to go back. I didn’t get to see the people in the secretariat concerned with library matters and they took a very dim view of it. They have to stay...
MRS. LARSON: Why is that?
DR. FRASE: I just surmise this, but it’s a good surmise. First, well, three things. One, “it-was-not invented-here” syndrome. We didn’t invent this thing. Two, the United States and Great Britain were no longer members of UNESCO, so we had no internal clout, and three, UNESCO was very much concerned with the developing countries. They had the majority of the UN and this was a matter that could logically concern them, the developing countries because all of the paper had been just junk, but some of their delegates took the position of if they endorse permanent paper and we don’t make it, then we’re being discriminated against.
MR. LARSON: Yes.
MRS. LARSON: I can see that.
DR. FRASE: So there was a combination of factors. The IFLA resolution as a matter of fact, made a big point of asking UNESCO not to do anything to start with but just to make a survey, an UNESCO survey of how much permanent paper is being used. But even that wasn’t acceptable to them. So that flopped. Then in 1991, there was another general conference of UNESCO that I wanted to go to for a variety of reasons. This was in Moscow. I had been involved in depression matters for many years starting with the fact that I was [inaudible] in Russia when I was knocking about Europe in 1931. In 1947, 1946, had been director of the UNESCO mission in Russia for several months and had been in two book publishers conferences in Russia. So I was wanting to go, I was an old Russian hen, and my wife had never been there, so I wanted to take her along. I went to the IFLA conference and she came along. Right in the middle of it was the coup attempt when they had captured… (Laughter) …the prime minister.
MR. LARSON: That was a very troubled time.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. And there was this assault on the White Tower, the Parliament building. Eleanor was actually in the Kremlin just as a sight-seer the day the tanks were on the street and her bus had trouble getting back to her hotel with the tanks on the street of Moscow.
MR. LARSON: That was an exciting time.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. We were in a hotel not to close to where the conference was in the center of Moscow, but actually nothing much was going on except in the center of Moscow. People in the rest of the city were just going about their business. So I got the resolution through, sponsored by the American delegation, the British delegation, but the last day when the resolutions were passed, got cancelled because of a confusion there and so they never officially got passed at the conference. But then they had a process of sending them out to the membership later and getting them endorsed that way. A couple of years later the resolution got passed and this again stressed UNESCO getting into the act. Then we had negotiations with UNESCO led by Bob Wedgeworth who was the, had gotten, after being executive director of the American Library Association had gotten to be the president of IFLA for two years. But still we got nowhere and to finish that story on IFLA, I was at the general conference, or a conference of UNESCO, I mean IFLA in Cuba, in August two or three summers ago and got involved again with the preservation people, especially the Canadians who were then willing to get in the effort since they couldn’t get cooperation from the staff to get various national delegations of UNESCO to raise the question at the general conference. They were well on their way to doing that, but then UNESCO’s secretariat people persuaded them that they would at long last take the initiative and we didn’t have to do it that way. So that’s where it stands at the moment.
MR. LARSON: Very interesting.
MRS. LARSON: Fascinating.
DR. FRASE: But also in IFLA, at the Moscow conference after the second resolution was passed I talked to the editor of the IFLA Bulletin, I think that’s the name, but I’ve got copies somewhere. They said, “You ought to have an article on permanent paper.” So I did one. The first article they ever had in the 1991. And then I did another one, the “Permanent Paper Progress Report,” and then I did another one in 1995, “Permanent Paper Progress Report, Year 2.” Also on the international side, the Europeans somehow lagged behind on this, and part of the reason except for the Scandinavian countries which had been producers of paper, part of the reason was technical, they used a lot more carbonate in their paper as filler in their book and printing papers, so the deterioration was not quite as great as the one here when we use alum as a sizer and not so much carbonates. There is another factor too, and that is the type of government that you have. You hear a pressure group like the American Library Association can go to the Congress, get a bill introduced and get it started, then the Executive Branch either has to support it or not support it, but anyway, you can get an independent initiative. In Europe you have to persuade the government to do it, persuade the bureaucrats to do it because no bill is going to pass unless it is introduced as a government bill, by the government.
MR. LARSON: Essentially the executive part, branch.
DR. FRASE: That’s right. The executive and the parliament are the same. The executive is a committee of the parliament.
MR. LARSON: Yes. So it’s quite different where they are independent in this country.
DR. FRASE: You can’t use that avenue. You have to persuade the bureaucrats and they are hard to persuade. Having been one myself, I know that much. (Laughter)
MR. LARSON: That’s a very interesting point.
DR. FRASE: But to bring it up to date, they gradually got into, York got into the act. But it was slow. In 1995, there was an organization called the European Foundation for Library Cooperation. It was an inter-country library association called the Foundation for Library Cooperation Group de Lesion. They cooperated and got a survey made of European publishers, how much they were doing about permanent paper, using it and so forth, whether they even knew about it. This survey was published in 1995 and it showed they had very little knowledge about permanent paper and only a minority of publishers were using it. Then there was a, meanwhile, there was a catalogue of European publishers published by this same library group with a publishing association on publishers who had paper that met the American National Standard of 1992. At that time, nobody was using the International Standard of 1994 which was based on the American Standard. By that time, there was quite a lot, at least 25 papers that met the American National Standard…
[Break in video]
DR. FRASE: …on permanent papers. This followed a catalogue that Ellen McCreedy…
MRS. LARSON: By a catalogue you mean a list of paper mills that produced…
DR. FRASE: Yes. I’ll explain it. The origin of this was that, I think in 1933, when we were still concerned about this problem of conflict between the executive order on recycling requiring a certain amount of recycled material, and the permanent paper law. So we got to talking on the phone and I said, “We ought to find out how much of a problem this is. We have the permanent paper with a considerable amount of recyclable material in it so it wouldn’t present a problem.” So she said, “I’ve been thinking of a survey anyway.” So she undertook to write to all the paper mills in the United States and Canada and asked for information by brand name of every paper that they produced that met the American National Standard of 1992. The result was this first catalogue in 1994. At that time, she got responses so that she was able to say, she wrote to 60 paper companies and she sent them a copy of the standard. She got 28 responses for the 1994 survey. She had 28 companies and they reported that they were producing 387 papers classified by name, classified by company and use. These were all kinds of papers including xerographic papers. She subsequently did this over again in 1995 and increased the number of companies and increased the number of papers.
MRS. LARSON: All alkaline papers?
DR. FRASE: Not only alkaline, but meeting the permanent paper standard. We also used this catalogue to include in the last meeting of the governors so that they could, their people could see this is not a problem. If you want to do it, you can get the papers easily.
MR. LARSON: Very good point.
DR. FRASE: That’s right.
MR. LARSON: It’s not a theoretical.
DR. FRASE: So, that brings us to the present situation. We don’t have any direct measure of how much permanent paper is being use in books and documents. In the original Pell resolution there was encouragement to publishers to tell what type of paper was being used, whether it was permanent or alkaline paper, to put it in the book. This would mean that the librarians could put it into their bibliographical records. So they wouldn’t have to go around testing papers to know whether it was alkaline or not. Also, it would then get into the Cataloguing in Publication system which means that the computerized records of libraries all over the country would have it automatically in their computerized catalogues.
MR. LARSON: How about the Library of Congress?
DR. FRASE: They run the catalogue system which is called Cataloguing in Publication therefore supply the libraries of the United States and abroad too, with the cataloguing information. So if they’ve got this about the paper, it goes very easily into the computerized record of the individual libraries.
MR. LARSON: I make use of, access to the Library of Congress Catalogue through my computer. It’s quite handy. I use it quite often and I’ve never seen any reference to whether the book was permanent or…
DR. FRASE: Well, the only ones that use it that supply that information systematically through the Library of Congress unfortunately are the university presses…
MR. LARSON: Oh yes.
DR. FRASE: …and the other presses, publishers got started saying, “Well, we can’t do that because the second and third printings may not be on alkaline paper.” Even though, all, well most of the publishers are printing on alkaline paper now, the Library is not concentrated on having them do that so we don’t have any direct measure. So what we have are indirect measure and this catalogue of permanent paper availability is one measure and another measure is in the third and final report of the three consecutive agencies to the Congress which was as of December 31, 1995, the GPO stated that they, one of their ways of buying paper is by competitive bid and book purchase. The low bidder. In 1995, 99.9 percent of the book papers procured through book purchase by the Government Printing Office were alkaline. So it’s an incredible development.
MR. LARSON: That’s fantastic.
MRS. LARSON: Great.
DR. FRASE: The third report unfortunately got, there were other important developments recorded, got lost again when it got over to the Congress and we are now in the process of finding it once more and getting it printed as a Senate document, but meanwhile, I got onto…
[End of Interview]